


Guilty

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Eventual Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-19
Updated: 2018-06-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:35:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9829892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: “This may be the first time I have ever attracted a hiring director," Sherlock said. "Tell me, what is it you think you’re hiring me for?”Sherlock Holmes: fortune-teller, con artist, hero.





	1. Meet the New Boss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [therinde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/therinde/gifts).



> For better or worse, the fic for therinde, my high bidder in the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, is running long. I as a writer run slow, and I thought she ought to have _something_ to be going on with. Hence this first chapter, in spite of my general reluctance to post WiPs. I hope it proves enticing.

Someone was kicking Sherlock’s leg: Sherlock could feel it, even though his leg was far away. “I’m _busy,_ ” he said. “Haven’t you someone else to disturb?” He tried to turn himself over, away, but the heavy floaty feeling was too much for him. Perhaps if he tried for just his head . . . _There._

“Ah-ah-ah”: a tenor, speaking from closer to Sherlock than his own leg was. “I need your attention, Will.”

 _Hell._ “Give me the wallet.”

“With not a moment’s hesitation! Too high to roll over, but you know how I found out your name. _Shezza_.” Something dropped onto Sherlock’s chest — his wallet; he flailed after it, slowly, got his fingers around it.

The voice continued: “ _Shezza,_ ugh. Time to lose that colorful sobriquet. _No way_ did you pick it for yourself. It doesn’t sound like you. It doesn’t look like you. I guess if it had a smell it would smell like you, phew, but anyhow I’m going to call you Will. Oh, and _Will_? Isn’t there a question you should be asking right about now?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Sherlock said, keeping his eyes closed. “Talk talk talk talk talk. Why would I want to ask you any questions when I already know the answers?”

“Bored yet?” said the voice. It wasn’t directed at Sherlock this time. “Heave-ho, me hearties — ”

Two men, one for feet, the other for shoulders. How had he not noticed them? They must have been standing well back, he told himself, his perceptions were certainly _not impaired_ even if his coordination wasn’t everything it could have been, and then the voice had abandoned piratical inflections in favor of a near-falsetto “Oopsy-daisy,” and then there was a car door opening, but why didn’t they leave him alone, and what about his gear? He twisted and, with some success, bucked — “Needs a top-up,” said the voice at his feet. A baritone like Sherlock’s own, so the rumble came right through the hands and into Sherlock’s ankles.

Camp again: “Oooh, so he does. Just a bit, Sebby, don’t take chances.” Feet shoved into the seat well, shoulders shoved against the seat back, safety belt _click_ ; a hand on his wrist, sleeve shoved up, _needle;_ “Hey,” said the baritone, “can you believe this, Jim? He’s still got a vein.”

Sherlock thought, approximately, that under other circumstances he would be worried about being taken by people he didn’t know to a destination he hadn’t been apprised of, but the great gift of the poppy was the sure knowledge that _all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,_ and wasn’t that glorious? Wasn’t that sure knowledge glorious?

*

Sherlock’s heroin dreams were always prosaic: There was someone talking in the hall, for example — only, no, there wasn’t, he would realize a moment later, somehow he had transposed a sound that came from his left, hearing it as though it came from his right, and when he moved the sound he also attached a shadow to it. There was no one in the hall, and the fact that he’d hallucinated someone was only a fact, neither troubling nor amusing though sometimes, if he had nothing better to do, he might ruminate on what neurological processes created these particular illusions and not others.

This time, it became apparent that the two men whose presence he had imagined were, in fact, present, flanking the door like telamones. Suits and ties; earpieces; hands at sides.

He was wearing clean clothes, not his; his feet were bare. He had not been bathed. Smell (air devoid of industrial cleanser), sound (quiet), and bedding (duvet; long-staple-cotton sheets). Not a hospital, then. No windows, therefore not a hotel. As he was neither in a hotel nor in hospital, and as in any case one nonviolent — _“junkie,”_ said the voice in his head which had been using that word for some time now, though Sherlock preferred to ignore it — wouldn’t rate two officers in civilian dress, this was a private location for holding prisoners, and the men at the door were guards.

The fix he’d been given in the car had now receded somewhat. Sherlock saw that his deductions were banal, also that he was taking the long way round to what any idiot would already have known: to wit, he had been kidnapped. The question why anyone would want to kidnap _him,_ as opposed to any other user in London, had also already been answered, by the conversation about his wallet. Someone knew that Sherlock could deduce things, therefore wanted Sherlock to perform that service on his behalf.

_Why not just offer you fifty quid and the makings of a dozen speedballs?_

This question was insistent, its answer obvious. Sherlock chose to ignore it.

_One speedball would’ve sufficed._

This point, too, Sherlock chose to ignore.

*

When some hours had passed in silence, the skin over Sherlock’s breastbone began to itch. He was bored and restless, and he could smell himself. An armchair stood in the corner diagonally across from the bed. “Any difficulty with my sitting over there?” he asked, without rising. The guards ignored him, so he sat up. A pair of black leather slippers stood just where he would have put his feet on the floor. Sherlock frowned. He kicked the slippers aside and made his way to the chair. The itch had migrated to his left arm; when he scratched there, it returned to his chest. He jiggled his leg, seated himself more comfortably in the chair, drew his right knee to his chest, brought his left knee up to join it, rubbed the fingers of his left hand against his thumb, wiped the sweat off his upper lip. He was growing more and more bored. It wouldn’t do to ask the guards for a top-up, though; it was one thing for them to see him bored and restless, another for them to learn that they had any leverage over him. They had no leverage — he reminded himself of this; there was nothing he needed, or even especially wanted.

If only he weren’t so bored.

*

At some point new guards came in and the first two guards went away. The room being windowless, and himself preoccupied, Sherlock could not know what time of day or night it was or how many hours had passed. He had availed himself, with no objection from the guards, of the loo attached to the room where he was being held, and had run cold water over his arms to take the edge off the sense that mites were scurrying in their myriads along his skin. Why did he think of mites, when the name of the feeling was formication, and formication was to do, etymologically, with ants, whereas mites were not even insects, they were — they were . . .

The mites-or-ants sensation was really very annoying now; he had made a little hole in the skin just to the left of his sternum and blood was smeared on the T-shirt they had dressed him in. Perhaps the guards would have something to top up with, if he could get to their pockets, but it wasn’t easy to work out how to do that: they would surely regard any approach as a threat, there were two of them, probably armed, and what with the boredom and restlessness he wasn’t at his best. For the dozenth time, he wiped his nose on his sleeve, got up, paced the room. The guards continued to ignore him.

The new guards’ suits, identical to those of the previous pair — so whoever had had Sherlock kidnapped liked his henchmen in uniform — were reasonably good, if not bespoke, but a touch flashy: the blue a shade too light, the fabric a glimmer too shiny. Conclusion: someone showy, dramatic, and fussy about detail was in charge of a prospering but not (not yet?) top-line criminal organization; additional conclusion: the man who had supervised Sherlock’s removal from the flat where he’d shot up was said drama-loving leader of a criminal organization; additional conclusion: said drama-loving leader of a criminal organization not only wished to make use of Sherlock’s skills but also took a personal interest in him. This last was troubling.

He retched again, and as he straightened, wiping away the reflexive tears and the string of thin bile-tasting spittle that depended from his mouth, the door opened. The guards had been alert, before; now their eyes widened, their posture stiffened; the one to the left side of the door tightened his mouth and glanced sideways, toward the man who had just come in — who gave Sherlock a finger waggle and said, “Wide awake, I see!”

Sherlock was dirty and junk sick and his clothing and shoes were gone. He did not often think of himself as valuing what the world called dignity. He squared his shoulders and looked at the newcomer. The spit on the back of his right hand cooled as it dried.

The kidnapper/crime boss — this must be he — wore the Westwood suit that he could not (yet?) afford to keep his minions in — or, no; Sherlock revised the thought: he would always want to outshine his underlings. He sounded, as he had during the kidnapping, like an overenthusiastic florist, and his guards were terrified of him. Sherlock was, he had to acknowledge, somewhat alarmed by this fact, because what sort of a man was it who terrified hard men? — but also intrigued. He mustered his upbringing around himself and said, “To what do I owe our acquaintance?”

“You do know it’s just another kind of camp, don’t you? All that poker-stiff politeness?”

“I’ll concede it for the sake of coming back to the more important point,” Sherlock said, and retched again, briefly. “You made it clear, earlier, that you take an interest in my deductive skills. Therefore you’ve a purpose you want to put them to. That the purpose is criminal in nature is apparent. But what, specifically, is it?”

“Shouldn’t we introduce ourselves first? Well, of course, I already know you. _Will._ You can call me Jim, all my friends do.”

“Are we friends? I hadn’t noticed.”

At this Jim’s face sharpened, as if a veiling had fallen aside, and something with foul breath showed itself for an instant before being put away again. Sherlock could not help himself: he took a step backward. Jim smiled. “Not friends? Okay then! Will, meet your new boss” — and he touched two fingers to the center of his own chest, lightly. His right canine had caught in his lower lip but as his smile grew wider the flesh was freed.

“Interesting,” Sherlock said. “This may be the first time I have ever attracted a hiring director. Tell me, what is it you think you’re hiring me for?”

“Oh, come on, Will, you can figure that out All. By. Yourself.” This with jazz hands.

“Fine,” Sherlock said. Cold shuddered through him; the room tilted. He took two steady breaths, fending off nausea. “You learned of some incident or other in which I demonstrated my ability to see through an attempt to deceive or to conceal motive. You want me to function as a human lie detector — or, no, that’s not it; you can detect lies perfectly well yourself. . . . Yes. Someone as good at reading the evidence as I am can ipso facto tell people what they want to hear. I can, in effect, cold read. In addition my accent is that of the educated upper middle classes. I sound, shall we say, credentialed.

“You want me to run cons — specifically, you’re thinking that a psychic would usefully diversify your business.”

Jim touched the tip of his tongue to his forefinger and then touched the forefinger to his own leg with a hiss. “You’re on fire!”

“No.”

Jim sighed. “Are you sure? Really truly absolutely sure?”

“I don’t work for anyone.”

“Well. I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed, but so it goes. Here’s a little something for your time.”

A wad of notes bound with an elastic round flew into Sherlock’s hands. Twenties, ten of them. “My clothing and shoes.”

Jim nodded toward the guard on his left, who went out and came back a moment later with a bag, which he slid across the floor toward Sherlock.

“Catch you later,” Jim said, and he and the guards went out.

When Sherlock, somewhat doubtful, tried the door a few minutes later, it was unlocked, and at the end of the waxed shining corridor was a door leading to the street. His own shoes made the only sound; the place might have stood empty for a decade, so dead was the air.

*

He went straight to Wiggins’s place, because Wiggins never went out and Sherlock needed to fix without wasting any time tracking down a source who might inconveniently have decided to take in an art film or go to Casablanca for the waters. Wiggins had taken a degree in neurology before he realized how much easier it would be to get hold of drugs if he dealt them himself, and he liked to pretend to keep up with scientific pursuits, so he had a decent chem lab set up in his kitchen. He was developing designer drugs, he said, not that Sherlock had ever seen any sign of it, but he let Sherlock conduct experiments sometimes, when Sherlock didn’t owe him any money.

Wiggins was weighing out powder and tipping it into glassine bags, which he held open awkwardly between the pinky and thumb of his right hand because the forefinger and middle finger had been splinted. The air in his flat smelled of antiseptic from A&E. “Ah,” Wiggins said when Sherlock let himself in, “you fuck off out of here, man.” Both Wiggins’s parents taught at Cambridge, but he liked to affect working-class authenticity around Sherlock, to emphasize that Sherlock was slumming.

(Once, in an unguarded moment when he had just fixed, Sherlock had told Wiggins: “You do realize I’m not slumming anymore.”

“Yeah,” Wiggins said. “You and me both, mate.”)

“What?” Sherlock said now, slow on the uptake because his gut was cramping and he had retched bile half a dozen times on the pavement outside Wiggins’s door.

Wiggins held up his right hand and turned it side to side, showing the splints from all angles. “You see that, yeah? That was a warning, and I did not like the receiving of it. I sell to you, they come back and take these off altogether. Not meaning the splints. So, what I said: Fuck off out of here.”

“They won’t know.”

“Same as they didn’t know I sell to you in the first place? Go on, you’re not that dim.”

“Chills,” Sherlock said, because to say this was not explicitly to beg.

“So you better find someone to fix you up sooner not later, yeah? But it’s not going to be me. _Out._ ”

*

Sherlock’s luck was in, if you discounted the abdominal cramps and the sweating: he found Niall in a “Tibetan handicrafts” stall in Camden Market, eyeing up the girl who worked the till. Meaning the girl’s luck was in, too, because the only thing Niall liked more than pestering girls who weren’t in a position to give him the bird and kick him in the bollocks was doing junkies a bad deal on heroin. “Yeah,” Niall said, “Shezza. What’s hangin’?” and Sherlock was in a cold sweat all over so he didn’t roll his eyes. He bought three bags and a set of works at what was, for Niall, a not-terrible price and stumbled into the nearest Boots for rubbing alcohol which he poured over the works in the Camden High Street Gentlemen’s Public Convenience before he fixed. When the sheer bliss of relief had subsided enough that he could make himself stand up again, he bought some fish and chips and went home.

Wiggins’s broken fingers niggled at him, but he had two bags left, and plenty of Jim’s money. Tomorrow was another day.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Same as the Old Boss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock had never been able to hold a job, never really tried, but this wasn’t quite a job; it was more in the nature of a consultancy, surely, and one well matched to Sherlock’s talents, at that.

Sherlock woke in the early evening and at once thought with pleasure of how he might pass the next hours; with two bags left and most of Jim’s money still in hand, there was no need to go busk for the tourists in Trafalgar Square, or to pick pockets on the tube. He took a shower — in the luxury of knowing he could top up any time, he almost enjoyed the metronymic want _(one),_ want _(two),_ want _(three)_ knocking, lightly, under his skin. Once he was clean it became more obvious how very bad indeed he must have smelled to Jim and the suit-clad henchmen. Perhaps he ought to do some laundry.

But how could he be expected to think about laundry when there was always some business to take care of first?

He had squared his shoulders and looked direct at Jim, though: he reminded himself of this.

There was a bag of coffee in the refrigerator. He rinsed out the French press, made himself a cup, and fixed at the kitchen table while it brewed. Seb, or whatever his name was, hadn’t blown a vein, at least, but all the same it was high time to develop genuine ambidexterity, a useful skill in many contexts . . .

. . . The morning light was low and slanted and the air had cooled. Sherlock’s coffee had gone bitter, so he gulped it down to avoid tasting it. He tasted it anyway, so he ate some leftover chips to clear it out. The difference between the condition of having two bags left and the condition of having one was remarkable in its starkness. Between one and zed a gulf yawned, yet how easily it might be leapt over. The laundry would wait; Sherlock pulled on his jacket and made his way to Camden Market.

*

Camden Lock Place was closed off by crime scene tape.

There was no reason to conclude, in the absence of further data, that there had been a murder; especially there was no reason to conclude that, had there been a murder, the victim was anyone known to Sherlock. He kept going up Chalk Farm Road to the next entry. It was open; Sherlock went in and then circled along the horse stalls and toward Camden Lock Place till he hit the backside of the crime scene. From here he could see the screen that had been put up in front of the Tibetan handicrafts stall. There was a gray-haired man in mufti, looking tired and in charge, talking with a couple of women in Tyvek suits; after some time, a body bag on a wheeled stretcher emerged.

“Guess who did it,” said Jim, softly, in Sherlock’s ear.

Sherlock turned. “Obviously— ” Oh, _no_.

How much time had passed between the moment when Sherlock was loaded into Jim’s car, and the moment when he came to in the windowless room, with black leather slippers set ready for his bare feet? Blood, hair, a cast of his shoeprints: more than enough to elaborate a persuasive case against a man with no alibi and no friends. “The CCTV,” Sherlock said, unable to stop himself although he knew it was futile; and of course Jim would have to rub it in: he raised his eyebrows, tilted his head, pursed his lips, tsk-tsk-tsk. The woeful state of the Camden Market infrastructure. A terrible thing.

A woman next to Sherlock glanced between him and Jim, frowning. She could not have heard Jim’s opening line, and Jim, having run through his pantomime of dismay, had unwrapped a stick of gum and was chewing it with evident pleasure; Sherlock’s face, then, was the telltale. “Well,” he said, “that’s quite interesting,” but he could hear himself, thready and unconvincing; he turned back to look at the entryway of the Tibetan shop and forced himself to relax his shoulders and assume an expression of phlegmatic curiosity. The gray-haired man, the detective, was bending sympathetically now toward the girl who had been at the till the day before: she sat in a folding chair, wringing her hands. She would have opened the shop this morning to find Niall. Impossible to tell, from this distance and with the body hidden inside the police bag, how he had been killed. A knife, most probably. Gloves would account for the lack of fingerprints on the handle, of course, and it was easy to picture the killer, shaky with the novelty of the act, cutting himself. As he pulled the blade, for example, from the dead or dying torso, he might have loosened his grip . . .

When Sherlock looked behind himself again, Jim was gone. Sherlock watched the police for a little longer, but the crowd had already begun to thin some minutes ago, when the van bearing Niall’s corpse pulled away; soon lingering would make him conspicuous, so he walked home again.

*

On the way, he thought over his options. It was a short walk, but that was all right, as there weren’t many options to think over. Jim, or his flash-suited muscle, had broken Wiggins’s fingers, but Niall hadn’t been given even that much warning; Jim had escalated fast. Unexpectedly fast. Quite likely, Sherlock could find someone else to supply him without very much trouble — could find someone, and then another someone, and then, perhaps, a third someone, before word got out to every last dealer in London that selling to Shezza would get you killed. Soon enough, the police would be looking for a serial killer, and Jim would have laid a trail of breadcrumbs, of blood and hair and shoeprints, to one Will Holmes.

He could go to Mycroft — _Oh, what do you care? They love you best they always have done there’s no need for me even to_ — No. “Stupid stupid stupid,” he repeated, until the word stopped meaning anything. He put his right hand in his jacket pocket and rubbed his thumb against the side of his forefinger, and eventually the meaningless sound and the rubbing combined to enable him to think further.

He could leave London, but that possibility, unpleasant enough in itself, also left Jim permanently in possession of the means to convict him of murder. Strike that.

What, then, if he pretended to accede? Sherlock had never been able to hold a job, never really tried, but this wasn’t quite a job; it was more in the nature of a consultancy, surely, and one well matched to Sherlock’s talents, at that.

Besides: a condition of the deal would be Jim’s supplying him with heroin. Not that heroin in itself was a problem for Sherlock — on the contrary — but getting hold of heroin was. The need to make money was a constant annoyance, taking up time and putting him at risk of arrest. But when he had heroin, he was fine. Better than fine. His thoughts calmed. Certain responses to himself that he had never been able to regard with the equanimity they deserved faded into blessed insignificance. Now, with the problem of reliable supply solved, he would be able to do — well, anything. He would revive his subscriptions to _Chemistry,_ and _Nature Neuroscience,_ and _Cell._ Set up a proper lab. Conduct experiments without relying on Wiggins’s unreliable — and now entirely unavailable — good graces.

As for the clients: information about how phony clairvoyants produced their effects was widely available — even Wikipedia had quite a serviceable article about cold reading; if people chose to remain ignorant of these facts, and to allow themselves to be misled, that was hardly Sherlock’s lookout.

*

“Like it?” Jim extended an arm to encompass the space: he was an estate agent, or — a more unsettling notion — a naughty-weekend hotelier. Sherlock thought it was the former; Jim’s interest in him was invasive enough, intimate even, but not specifically sexual. It was only Sherlock’s mind that he wanted to slip his fingers into. Arse-fuck or mind-fuck, Sherlock could handle either one, but both together, and with Jim . . . The voice he didn’t like, the voice that used the word _junkie,_ whispered _That would undo you completely and you know it._ Somewhere a klaxon was going off.

“Can we abandon the pretense that anything about this situation is voluntary on my part?” Sherlock had forced himself to use just half his remaining bag, so as to have a top-up in reserve in case none was immediately forthcoming from Jim; six hours had passed since then, and Jim’s routine was wearing thin.

“It” was two first-floor rooms on Montague Street, above the shopfront where Sherlock was to ply his trade. The flat was furnished in the same style as the room where Sherlock had been kept two days before, neutrally tasteful, like the pied-à-terre a large corporation might keep for traveling executives. On the walls hung black-and-white “art” photos: a leaf, printed in high contrast to make the veins stand out; a nautilus, printed in high contrast to make the divisions in the shell stand out. They set Sherlock’s teeth on edge.

Jim grinned and popped his gum. “You can’t say I didn’t give you a choice.”

 _Rather a constrained choice,_ Sherlock didn’t say. By the sink he could see a small stainless-steel dish, a jug of distilled water, and an NHS-labeled box of disposable syringes. How long had Jim been preparing all this with Sherlock in mind? “You’ve taken some pains to make sure I fall in with your plans for me. All right, I’ve fallen in. But it’s difficult to see why this project is worth the time and money you’ve already invested.”

“Oh, but that’s just the word: invested. Right now” — Jim came closer — “right now, you’re teetering on the edge of something great.” He was a few inches shorter than Sherlock; it was like having a shiny fast animal looking at his throat, to have Jim so near. “I think you’re going to like it. You’re clever. Cleverer than most people. Cleverer than almost everybody. Don’t you agree?”

Transfixed, Sherlock nodded.

“And now you’re going to see what it’s like to put that cleverness to use. I’m making a bet. I’m giving you a little hit of your new drug, Will: making the marionettes dance. I think you’ll like it. Better than heroin. Better than _anything._ If I’m right, we’ll make a great team. And if I’m wrong, well — ” He set his index finger pointing upward under Sherlock’s jaw. “So it goes.”

They looked at each other over the gun that was Jim’s hand.

“Now,” Jim said, folding back his finger and taking his hand away, “let’s have a look at your offices.”

*

From Montague Street, clients — marks — would enter a waiting room with four upholstered chairs in green-and-gray hound’s-tooth. The front window, discreetly curtained, announced “W. S. S. Holmes, Practical and Spiritual Counseling,” in crisp black Garamond. On the walls, framed quotations, or, properly speaking, pseudo-quotations, to wit:

“ _Trust yourself; then you will know how to live_ — Goethe”

“ _Your dream doesn’t have an expiration date. Take a deep breath, and try again_ — Mother Theresa”

“ _There is love in holding — and there is love in letting go_ — Native American saying”

And, perhaps worst of all:

“ _Believe_.”

“You don’t think that’s laying it on rather thick?” Sherlock said of this last, through a wave of nausea of whose source he felt unsure. Under the street-side window was, inevitably, a low table of pale wood on which were arranged three smooth black stones and a narrow glass vase with some bare black branches in.

 Jim giggled. “It’s so spiritual!”

The consulting room was as bad as the waiting room: it was set up like a psychotherapist’s, with a chair for a single client, a sofa should clients arrive in pairs, and a bookcase full of titles most of which seemed to include the words “Zen,” “Living,” or “Hope.” Sherlock had considerable confidence in his acting abilities but was nevertheless relieved to see no scrying ball or deck of Tarot cards.

He had begun to sweat all over his face, and to feel dizzy; the trouble was not the décor, then. He needed the other half of that _(last)_ bag, soonest.

“Aw,” Jim said.

Sherlock doubled over, retching, and put his hand over his mouth.

“You _really_ don’t want to puke in here, Will.” This voice belonged to the thing that had looked at him out of Jim’s eyes when Sherlock suggested that they weren’t friends; all at once Sherlock understood that it was not one of Jim’s henchmen who had killed Niall, but Jim himself, for the pleasure of it. He wondered, through the nausea, just how long Jim might have been about that work. He found the door to the staircase and stumbled up it to the flat. His works and the last of Niall’s dope were in the breast pocket of his jacket, along with his wallet; he fumbled them out and stripped off his jacket before fetching the bowl, the water, and a syringe from the supplies in the kitchen. Somewhere he had lost the length of tubing he used to tie off his arm.

“Looking for this?” Jim said, and dropped it on the table in front of Sherlock. He was quick, so quick; when had he got to the tubing?

Jim’s hand came down again, gently this time, thumb and forefinger delicately pinched around another envelope. “You’ll find this is much better quality than that dumb Niall ever sold.” He let the envelope drop the last few inches to the table; Sherlock managed not to snatch at it, but of course Jim saw the abortive movement. Sherlock thought he might grow to detest that _tsk tsk tsk._ Maybe he already did.

 


	3. Workingman's Blues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It was rather like living in any other serviced flat, apart from the surveillance, and of course apart from Jim._
> 
>  
> 
> Sherlock settles into his new life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to the beneficent [TSylvestris](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris) and to my most excellent spouse, S., for support and dopey-error wrangling.
> 
> [DiscordantWords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/works) has made a beautiful, marvelously ominous cover for this fic, which you may view and be thrilled by [here](http://discordantwords.tumblr.com/post/162143243211/got-a-little-photoshop-happy-this-evening-and).

 

It was rather like living in any other serviced flat, apart from the surveillance, and of course apart from Jim.

Just before nine in the morning, a messenger appeared bearing the day’s ration of heroin, and Sherlock fixed.

(On the first day, Sherlock fell back on the manners he had learnt in childhood: “Good morning,” he said; “Won’t you come in?,” but the man at the door shot him a look of startled contempt, dropped his packet at Sherlock’s feet, and turned down the stairs without a word. After that Sherlock never spoke to the messenger again. Some months later that man was replaced — Sherlock never worked out the reason, and Jim never told — but Sherlock did not speak to the replacement, either.)

At eleven an alarm went off in case he had fallen asleep. This gave him enough time to rouse himself and shower before opening W. S. S. Holmes, Practical and Spiritual Counseling, at noon. On Tuesdays and Fridays at precisely eleven-ten, he accepted delivery of groceries and other supplies. He was available to clients until four p.m. Also, between noon and four on Wednesdays, one of Jim’s minions cleaned the flat and laundered his clothes or took them to the cleaners. At four p.m. Sherlock closed up for an hour “to keep you fresh for the evening crowd,” Jim said. At five he reopened the shop and kept it open till ten; on Friday and Saturday evenings, eleven. After closing up, he fixed.

He was required to eat two meals a day. He could heat one of the prepared meals supplied to him, or order takeaway from his choice of five restaurants where Jim’s organization had accounts. They were good restaurants and delivery was always swift.

The flat was monitored by CCTV and audio. Jim had explained to Sherlock the consequences of any attempt to disable the surveillance or to bolt; had emphasized them with a video clip of a previous defector from his realm. “You’d best never lose that phone,” Sherlock had said, dry-throated, after the last tiny scream cut off.

Jim smiled and patted his pocket. “Oh, come on, Will. You must have noticed what good care I take of everything I own.”

In other ways, just as Sherlock’s flat was like any serviced flat, the business was like any business. W. S. S. Holmes, Practical and Spiritual Counseling, had a pretty website, dotted with inspirational prose and illustrated with a photo of Sherlock, retouched so he didn’t look as though he’d spent every waking minute for two years acquiring heroin and then, when he acquired it, shooting it up. And somewhere a PA replied to email inquiries and answered the phone.

*

Sherlock could find, in his mind’s ear, the sound of himself, small, asking questions: Of his father, concerning the lives of bees; how the illusion worked by which paint on canvas could represent the movement of ocean; why one sometimes toasted cumin before grinding it, and sometimes didn’t, and at other times left it whole. Of his mother, how to find the area of an irregular polygon; why blood turned brown as it dried; why, if rust and fire were both types of oxidation, did metal not burn as it rusted. Of Mycroft: where Mycroft was going; whether Sherlock could come too; why school was so boring; how to make friends.

And all their voices, quiet or laughing, from time to time sharp with annoyance, often eager with explanation, almost always warm.

Sherlock could listen through memory year by year, and year by year the sound of voices faded. As far back as he could remember, there had been the sounds of pages turning. Later there came keyboard clicks; clumsy music, careful music, soaring music; glass rod ringing in a beaker as Sherlock stirred; the hum of a fume hood. But fewer and fewer voices. Sometimes all Sherlock said on any given day was “How much?” and all he heard was a number.

(Mycroft had replied, “If I knew, then, believe me, I would tell you.” That had been a long time ago, before Sherlock had discovered how to enhance his solitude with heroin.)

*

Later, what Sherlock remembered most strongly about the first day of the W. S. S. Holmes (J. Moriarty) counseling business was the quiet. It was even quieter than his last days of liberty — of something like liberty — had been. He sat at his desk in the consulting room, hands folded in front of him, watching the CCTV feed from the front door. At four, he locked up, climbed the stairs, and sat on the couch with his hands on his knees. It was far too soon for withdrawal to have set in, but he soon found himself scratching at his forearms anyway. To distract himself and pass the time he closed his eyes, listening to the muffled street sounds, thinking: _If I had identified sound samples for comparison, I could learn to distinguish all the makes of automobile engines._ Thinking: _I wonder whether I can construct a complete picture of this space from memory._ Thinking: _What did Jim do with the body of the man in the video?_

He rejected the idea of asking Jim for sound samples. He was ignorant of how criminal organizations might dispose of bodies, assuming they didn’t want the bodies found, although even without direct empirical knowledge he could form hypotheses. _Dropped in the Thames on an outbound tide. Dismembered and laid in wet cement in a Belgravia basement being dug out by a Russian plutocrat who wants a swimming pool. Stuffed in with another corpse in the last moment before the coffin is sealed._

At five o’clock he went downstairs and opened up the shop again. No one came. He studied the objects in his office and found that if he consciously attended to each of them and to their disposition in the space, he could reproduce the room, detail perfect, in his mind.

Silence. Itching.

Sherlock had nearly finished re-creating his flat from memory when the front-door chime sounded. The time was 9:30; at ten, he could go upstairs and fix and lie down and for a few hours stop gnawing at the tail of his own thoughts; the words “Shoo, get out, can’t you see I’m busy” were on his tongue before he was brought up short by the knowledge of what Jim would do if he breached the terms of his servitude.

He closed his eyes, counted five, then opened the consulting room door, smiling, and said, “Welcome!” to the woman sitting in the corner chair.

She had chosen the spot that gave her the best vantage of the waiting room as a whole. But instead of watching the door through which W. S. S. Holmes, Spiritual and Practical Counselor, would emerge, as one might expect of a prospective client curious about the person she was about to pay, she had trained her gaze, and with it her full attention, on the street door. She had been chewing her lip; at the sound of Sherlock’s voice she shot halfway out of the chair.

He tilted his head. “Who do you expect may come through that door?”

“Oh, thank God!” she said.

*

As far as Delia Smithson was concerned, Sherlock had already demonstrated his supernatural perceptiveness, but even if she’d only been halfway sure of him, he would have found it easy to guide her toward perfect faith.

She wore a crystal of amethyst on a chain around her neck, so he inquired about the state of her aura. In reply, she told him all about her dead ex-boyfriend. He had used to drink, you see, and then he’d get rough with her; she didn’t like to call the police, at first, but then she did, and they arrested him, which she felt a bit bad about, really, though it was a relief as well, but then he got out of gaol and the first thing he did was to start in drinking again — meaning, the _very_ first thing, even before he came after her, and he got trolleyed and then passed out under some shrubberies on Hampstead Heath, but it was a cold night and he died of hypothermia, which would have been fine only ever since he had been trying to come home, you see, and so he had been haunting her.

Sherlock, who had assumed warm-gazed attentiveness, hands prayerful, one forefinger tapping his lip, offered a sympathetic tsk.

“It’s such a relief,” Delia Smithson went on, “that you can see it. My aura, I mean. It feels — just gray to me. He’s everywhere I go, Mr. Holmes. Showing his face just for a moment and then he’s gone. Around a corner or in a crowd . . . It’s worst in the tube; nobody notices one extra figure. I’ve even asked people standing near him to get hold of him, you know, so I could confront him, because I would, but of course he’s a disembodied _spirit,_ so he slips away and they’re left holding some completely innocent person and naturally the person’s furious . . .”

“Of course, I see the difficulty,” Sherlock said. _The difficulty being that you are delusional_. How to satisfy —? “What you’ll need,” he went on, “is an exorcism —”

“Yes!”

“— but, as I’m sure you’re aware, this is an unusually complex case.”

“ _Is_ it?” Delia Smithson did not sound entirely displeased by the idea.

“Normally, we exorcise a vengeful entity that has possessed the seeker.” _Seeker!_ What cesspit of spiritualist nonsense had he dredged that word out of? “But in your case the entity, though linked with you, is not in possession.” Sherlock took a moment to admire his own simulacrum of bogus expertise.

Delia Smithson, naturally, assumed that he had paused to consider her problem. “Do you think you’ll be able to help?”

Sherlock gave a regretful sigh. “No reputable spiritual counselor can guarantee his results, I’m afraid. There are simply too many variables at work. But I can promise you that I’m as qualified an exorcist as you’ll find anywhere.” This was certainly true.

Delia Smithson made an appointment for the following evening at eight, when Sherlock promised to have some preliminary results for her. The front door had barely shut behind her when a whole-body tremor took hold. When it was done with him, he was covered in sweat. The time was 11:15. Late, late, late. He took the stairs to his flat two at a time, stumbling. It occurred to him as he dropped into a chair and tied off his left arm that in making his mental picture of the flat he had omitted all his gear.

He pressed his mouth against the back of his wrist, like a mother putting her lips against her child’s brow, and swallowed the long _ohhh_ of relief.

There was time to remember that once he had had not only relief but also pleasure, and just time to set that thought aside. He told the walls, “I’ll need access to the Internet”; then he put his head down.

*

When Sherlock awoke, at four in the morning, Jim was seated across the table, thumb-thumb-thumbing his phone. “Full marks for communication skills,” Jim said. Sherlock looked at the laptop between them and thought about whether he could safely reach for it.

“Of _course_ you can.” With his right forefinger, Jim pushed the laptop an inch in Sherlock’s direction.

Sherlock pulled it the rest of the way over to himself and rested his palms on the lid. Perhaps his thoughts showed on his face again, or perhaps Jim was only addressing the obvious idea that anyone in Sherlock’s position would have had, because Jim said, “Don’t bother trying to cheat the keystroke tracker,” and played a sound on his phone: not one of the sounds from the video he’d shown Sherlock already.

Sherlock nodded.

“What do you think,” Jim said: “trad, or nouvelle?”

Sherlock — still muzzy from the heroin despite the reaction that sound had set off in him — floundered for a moment until the subject of Jim’s question became clear. “A hybrid, given that I’ve already told her the situation calls for an atypical exorcism.” Under his breath, he added: _“ ‘Atypical.’”_

“I told you you’d take to the work like a duck to water,” Jim replied.

On his way out he reached as if to pat Sherlock on the shoulder, then drew back just before contact would have been made, with a look of distaste. Sherlock couldn’t tell whether the look was real. He lay down and refrained from rubbing at the place on his shoulder where the touch would have come.

When the morning alarm went off, he got up, he ate, he drank coffee, he took delivery of that day’s supply. He went downstairs and opened the shop. He waited for more clients, who didn’t appear. He also used the unoccupied time to click, lip curled, through a great many websites detailing procedures for exorcism, to consider some likely trajectories for Delia Smithson’s next few appointments, and to think painfully of all the heroin he could buy with Delia Smithson’s money, if only he were free to buy his own heroin again.

*

Ultimately, Ms. Smithson needed four visits before Sherlock was able to rid her of Vengeful Dead Ex. At the second, he gave her a vial of rock salt and instructed her to hang it, along with the amethyst, around her neck: this protected her from Dead Ex’s close approach, and the ring of salt poured around her bed enabled her to sleep in safety. At her third appointment, though she still watched the door anxiously, the hollows under her eyes had gone: she was sleeping well and eager to hand over her five hundred quid. Sherlock discussed with her the contents of half a dozen esoteric texts with titles such as _On the Turning Aside of Demons_ and _The Narrative of Trismegistus Concerning the Venery of Spirits,_ which he had found, he told her, in a section of the British Library to which access was scarcely ever granted, and which had furnished him with valuable insights that were informing his work as he developed a ritual suitable for her.

Of course, he would need to employ certain costly ingredients. _Of course._ These came to another six hundred and thirty pounds, and in view of the understandably unexpected additional expense he would drop his fee for the actual exorcism from nine hundred pounds to seven fifty — well below the standard rate for these things, no, no, there was no need to thank him; he was glad to be able to do it; this was, after all, a helping profession.

Certainly she should feel free to refer friends to the practice; he would do what he could for them.

*

Sherlock vacillated briefly between Latin and a purpose-invented gobbledygook for the words of the ritual, but opted for Latin because he had learned it in primary school, and why get creative when the Catholics had done the job for him already? “Sage, asafetida, a censer, a dozen twelve-inch beeswax candles and two candelabra to hold them. Matches. A shallow glass bowl six inches in diameter and black ink sufficient to fill it. Two handbells,” he told the air when he had finished his choreography. A box with a manifest including every item on his list arrived the next morning, brought by the same indifferent blank man who delivered the food. Sherlock arranged them in his office, rehearsed once, and that evening sent Delia Smithson home, entirely exorcised, just before eight. If her bank account had been a tin can, she could have held it to her ear to enjoy the clinking of the coin or two within.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, and then Sherlock could fix.

Jim let himself in at ten past nine.

*

The door chime had not gone off and Sherlock was not at all sure he had been able to keep his face impassive; he thought wishfully of the delivery man’s blankness; but then, to the delivery man, Sherlock never came as a surprise. Besides which — but he arrested this train of thought.

Jim disposed himself on the psychotherapeutic sofa in the consulting room, in an arrangement of limbs suggestive of the vapors. Sherlock had three and a half thousand pounds stuffed into an A10 envelope and this he fished out of the drawer he kept it in. He was glad of his choice of envelope: he could hand it over, keeping hold of one edge, and hope that skin wouldn’t touch skin.

Whether he had concealed the relief when his hope was borne out — that was another matter.

“Delia was _adorable_ ,” Jim said. He was holding the envelope between the fingers of both hands, walking the fingers up and down the paper. Watching him was like biting metal, Sherlock thought. “But I just don’t know, Will. You let her off so easy!”

Terror made the room whoosh out and then back in. “Oh,” Sherlock replied, mastering himself, taking a calm and ordinary breath, “was that a mistake? I thought it more in the nature of an investment — ‘He did just what he said he’d do, he didn’t string me along,’ impressing all her equally feeble-minded friends with my probity. No?”

“Oh no no no no. See, Will, what you’re forgetting: the marks _want_ _more._ The longer your little show goes on, the harder they’ll work to believe every word you say.” Jim widened his eyes and made a moue. “ ‘I can’t _possibly_ have been spending so much money all this time on a _fraud._ ’ Once they’ve been telling themselves that for a while, it’s practically their reason for being. And then what you’re selling isn’t any particular thing you do, anymore. Nope!” Popping the terminal consonant, just the way Sherlock sometimes did. “Now you’re selling time in your _aura._

“Not to Delia, though. You’re in her past now. Once a few days go by, no more top of mind for W. S. S. Holmes. Soon she’ll stop talking about you at all. Well, unless her symptoms come back, of course, but you can’t count on that.

“So remember: String. Them. Along. And that’s it for today’s lesson! No knuckle-rapping this time, and I know how much you appreciate the forbearance.”

Jim stretched out the corners of his mouth, waggled his fingers, and was gone. Forty-five minutes remained before Sherlock was scheduled to close the shop; it was enough time for the sweat to dry from the small of his back, but his hands didn’t stop shaking till he was upstairs and tying off his arm.

 

 


	4. Nor Iron Bars a Cage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a species of nonsense for every kind of pain, and all Sherlock need do was choose the right nonsense and apply it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know what to say about [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris), who read this chapter, identified exactly what was wrong, and uttered magical incantations that enabled me to fix it. *Gazes at Sylve in mingled awe and gratitude*

Delia Smithson was a foretaste of . . . at first, nothing much. Days upon days passed, which Sherlock spent almost alone — food and heroin delivery apart; on three occasions Jim paid a call. Sherlock got used to that, more or less, meaning that as long as Jim didn’t show him any videos or hint at feeling dissatisfaction with Sherlock’s job performance, Sherlock could keep his breathing even and would sweat only a little, under his arms and behind his knees. Meanwhile he had hours and hours to spend on the Internet, absorbing the lessons of famous psychics and con artists before him. Jim applauded, the evening when Sherlock proposed putting a donation box in the waiting room, labeled with the name of a charity funding dream trips for fatally ill children with winsome expressions, these children being also depicted on the sides of the box. “Ooh, that’s not bad, Will!” Jim said. “Not bad at all,” and not only a box but some brochures and pre-addressed envelopes, for cheques, appeared with the food delivery the next day. Naturally there was also a web address, with a button for donations by credit card. Sherlock looked at this, and then realized he had been looking at it long enough that Jim might take note of his looking and draw a potentially dangerous conclusion, so he closed the tab and returned to his studies.

The spirit world, clairaudience, feng shui, aromatherapy, crystals. Bach flower remedies, Reiki, ghosts, past lives, recovered memories . . . There was a species of nonsense for every kind of pain, and all he need do was choose the right nonsense and apply it.

To stare out the window: how much? Not to stare at all: obviously an artifice, Sherlock thought, the way one might avoid looking at anything for which one's hunger was too sharp. He had not used to look at the strongbox where Wiggins kept his stock, for instance.

But Wiggins wasn't Jim.

One evening in March there was a late snow. Sherlock — casually, so casually — left open the door of the consulting room; from his desk, he had a line of sight to the front windows. Between the curtains, drawn together to reassure clients of their counselor's care for privacy, was a gap of a few inches through which, if he glanced in that direction from time to time, as if aimlessly, or as if raising his head from the screen, say to rest his eyes or to follow out a train of thought, Sherlock could catch — oh, a film frame's worth of soft-wet massy flakes as they drifted along that gap, slow-fleeting, made brilliant by street lamps and headlights that were themselves out of view.

He tried to keep himself awake for a while at night, after he fixed. Between the fear and the lack of exercise, this was less difficult than one might have expected. His bed stood under the window and the nearby buildings were taller than the place he inhabited; if he fought sleep long enough, and if any of the people who lived in those buildings were still up by the time he lay down, he could watch the lights in their windows go out one by one. Sometimes human figures were visible, moving or standing, passing in and out of the lit rooms, silent and untouchable as the stars, which from this angle Sherlock couldn't see at all and which, though he thought of them from time to time, he did not miss.

He was always careful to watch from under his lashes, because it was best to assume that Jim's surveillance ran to low-light cameras.

There was no way reliably to die by jumping from a first-floor window, not even if he flew headfirst.

*

On the Thursday of Sherlock's third week in Montague Street the weather warmed suddenly and the sun grew bright; early that afternoon, the front-door chime sounded, and behind it came the tumult of motors, voices, feet, and then fresh soft air touched with petrol and, barely, with the green of Russell Square. Sherlock said hello to the middle-aged man who had entered, he shook the man's hand, and he thought of how after Sherlock was done with him the man would take hold of the handle of the waiting room door and open it and step out onto the pavement and drop into the stream of people again, and then would walk toward whatever destination he desired, having relieved Sherlock's boredom for twenty minutes or an hour, and Sherlock hated him.

He was named Duane Oliphant. He was in his mid-thirties, he wore a wedding ring, his face was drawn and gray. “You have had a loss,” Sherlock said gently — _you and everyone else on the planet, that is_ — making Oliphant stifle a sob. His hair had been well cut, but the cut had grown out to shapelessness: “It hasn’t been long, has it,” and then “So young!,” because it wasn’t a divorce (the ring) and it wasn’t a dead pet (no hair on the clothes) and it _probably_ wasn’t a parent (sad loss, blah, blah, but _in the natural course of things_ blah blah, and if it was a parent but suddenly and untimely and so on, or a spouse, then “So young!” would suit as well as anything, but Sherlock had it right, because Oliphant said, “Six. _Six,_ ” and see? easy; after that it was an hour of _Joey wishes you weren’t so sad_ and _There’s so much he wants to tell you_ and _Why don’t you return in a few days and meanwhile I’ll work on establishing an open channel?_

Duane Oliphant made a second appointment. He thanked Sherlock; he turned the handle of the office door; he stepped out onto the pavement, dropped into the stream of people, and walked toward whatever destination he desired.

 _Ah,_ Sherlock thought, watching him go, _how well I prognosticate._

*

More and more often the front door chimed. The clients thought, as they told Sherlock when they stepped through, _It’s time for a change,_ or _Why am I so restless,_ or _It’s been almost a year since . . ._ Or “Spiritual and Practical” struck them as sensibly down to earth, or — this, none of them cared to admit — the triple-barreled initials of the eponymous counselor’s name struck them as posh, _and the British Museum’s right there,_ which was an imprimatur, wasn’t it? They had so many reasons to look in; once they looked in, of course, Sherlock had every reason to induce them to stay.

Maybe Jim had played one of his videos for the webmaster, too, for Sherlock discovered that the counseling service’s site now appeared very early indeed in search results. One Saturday, and then again the following Friday and Saturday, and then on four separate days the week after that, Jim's morning minion arrived bearing not only Sherlock's ration of heroin but also a piece of paper with a client's name, an appointment time, and “Subject of Appointment.” By midsummer, Sherlock was seeing almost no walk-ins at all; a new sign on the front door advised prospective clients to visit the website should they wish to see the counselor. The sign went up on a Monday, and on the Thursday Sherlock learned that he was now booked two weeks ahead. Scarcity creates demand: this was not news.

Now the days were filled with talk. Day after day: My dog/cat/bird/husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/daughter/son/demented grandparent is ill/missing/dead; can you help me find them/cure them/speak with them? What shall I do about my job? Is my husband cheating on me?

People who phoned for appointments arrived, as it were, pre-convinced, even more thoroughly than those who had just spotted the sign and rung the bell on impulse. Sherlock shook their hands and told them how very welcome they were and how very glad he was to be able to offer his services.

Jim had not been wrong to say that the work suited his talents well. Sherlock made a game for himself, of drawing the clients in without actually lying. This was child's play when the subject of the inquiry was unavailable for comment.

To the woman whose mother had died of Alzheimer’s three years past without their ever being reconciled: “She’s free of pain now,” Sherlock told her sincerely, “and it’s as if the dementia had never been.” Where was the lie? The dead didn’t suffer, being dead, and all the suffering they experienced in life evanesced with that life, had been less than smoke long before the body cooled. The lies could come later, having accreted plausibility to themselves thanks to that slippery not-untruth.

To the pensioner whose dog had wandered off on Hampstead Heath the previous month and not been seen since: “Cricket isn't lonely or afraid.” (Cricket had found someone to take him in, or Cricket had been hit by a lorry. It was possible, Sherlock supposed, that Cricket had been taken in by someone who shouted at him and struck him, in which case he might well be lonely and afraid, but that was no lookout of Sherlock’s.)

“You said to string them along,” he reminded Jim one evening. “But — these are small fry who come in. Your profit, once you’ve paid for this building and my food and — and other expenses, must come to less than nothing. So why?”

Jim had been smiling and popping his gum; now his face went still, he tilted his head, and Sherlock thought, _I forgot. How did I forget, even for an instant?_

“I told you months ago,” Jim said, “you’re an investment. I have bigger things in mind for you. _Much bigger things._ Don’t start feeling sorry for the small fry, gorgeous: they’re practice and if you don’t practice hard enough, you fail. Ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert, isn’t that what they say?”

 _Focused practice,_ Sherlock nearly replied, _not mindless repetition,_ but he bit his tongue, and Jim smiled wider than ever and said, “What, did you think I don’t know that’s a bastardization of the findings? Give me some credit, Will. —Actually, give me a lot of credit.”

Sherlock was able to keep Mr. Hodgson on the line, looking for Cricket, for three solid months, fifty quid Tuesday and fifty quid Thursday and fifty quid Saturday as Sherlock trawled the spirit world for clues that always came to nothing.

*

 _I am alive,_ he reminded himself. _I am alive, I am alive, I am alive._ Opening up the shop: _I am alive._ Eating the delicious meals provided from Jim’s restaurants: _I am alive._ Setting the needle at his left forearm one day, right forearm the next, meticulous to preserve his veins: _I am alive._ Drowsing downward, slackened, to set his head on Jim’s table in Jim’s kitchen in Jim’s flat: _I am alive._

A grain of sand _._

 _No,_ he thought on waking, always _No,_ and then _Please,_ but at the thought _Please_ he raised his head and stood and pissed and washed and dressed himself, because there was no one with whom to plead.

_I am alive._

_Please, no._

*

What could “far” mean when life was contained within the space of a storefront and the flat above? The pavement outside W. S. S. Holmes, Practical and Spiritual Counseling, could have been a hundred miles away; Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on the moon. Remote and more remote yet, Giltspur Street and the mortuary at Barts: they might as well not be.

“Just — go ahead.” The speaker frowned down at the cadaver she had just slit, breastbone to pelvis. The room smelled of meat and Thames, but neither she nor her visitor paid the stink any mind. “I’ve got to take samples from Mrs. Bronley here. The folder you want is the one with her husband’s name on it, I got his tox screen back yesterday, oh, well, of course, he came in last week — ”

“Double suicide?”

“I think so. They left that note, and he had taken . . . twenty grams, wasn’t it, of alprazolam. If I find the same in Mrs. B. . . . well, I think they just wanted to make the drowning easier, you know?”

“Yeah, we’re not seriously thinking it was murder. The Bronley folder’s on your desktop?”

“Subfolder of ‘Open Cases.’” She turned toward the screen, keeping her bloody-gloved hands well away from her companion. “Next to the one with ‘Weird’ on it.”

“‘Weird,’ huh? Not that it’s any of my business —”

“Well, no, I don’t know, it might be, I guess? It’s just, every so often something about a case bothers me, so I make another file for it. You know, not official or anything, just — bits and pieces. Probably nothing, most of the time.” She took up the forceps from the absorbent pad where she had set them and used them to reach into the dead woman’s torso, biting her lip.

“You, er, mind if I take a look?”

“Oh, no, no, go ahead. Like I said, none of it probably means anything.”

The man at the computer clicked on the folder designated “Weird.” There were half a dozen subfolders inside: fewer than he might have expected. But — “Molls, you didn’t like that one?” he said.

“Which?” she said, absently, drawing out a piece of the liver.

“Tully.”

Molly Hooper beamed from under her surgical cap, holding her sample of Mrs. Bronley’s liver aloft. “Oh, _Tully,_ ” she said.

*

One night in October the lights went out. All of the lights: in the office, in the flat, from the streetlights, and when Sherlock leaned out the front window to look up and down Montague Street, London stretched black before him. It wanted five minutes till eleven; he could have prepped his dose in the absolute dark of a cave a mile underground, anyway, and the light from his laptop screen should be enough to find a vein by.

It was.

Needle poised, finger on the plunger, lips pressed together in concentration . . .

He knew where the microphones and cameras were; there was no reason for Jim to bother to hide them. Still holding the syringe, Sherlock made a survey of the flat. All the red lights on all the devices had gone dark. Jim hadn’t planned for this. _Jim hadn’t planned for this._

With no mains power, there was no surveillance.

 _I could make a run for it._ Bolt for the Diogenes Club, press his hand to the bell until someone came. But if Mycroft wasn’t there. If Mycroft was there but would not see him. _You’ve done enough damage to this family, Sherlock._ Then Jim’s men catching up with him, the noises — And this was not even to reckon with the evidence that marked him as Niall’s murderer.

He had at present a sole advantage, and that a fleeting one: Whatever he did in the flat for the next while was his alone. Without wifi, without a phone, with no access therefore to the news, he could only guess at how long that while might be.

He set down the needle and went to look out the windows again. Columns of torchlight, now and then catching a face, an arm, a torso, marked a few places where people talked in agitated groups, or made their way to some destination where arrival couldn’t be postponed. Otherwise there was only darkness, whose border was out of view.

He might have hours. He might have the whole night long.

He couldn’t think his course through in enough detail to call it a plan; too much had to be left to chance. But it was child’s play — it had, literally, been child’s play to him — to palm all sorts of objects. He could fake shooting up. If he had time to get through a substantial part of the withdrawal before the lights came back on, if he could play-act his normal self through the rest, if he could steel himself to palm the daily ration and toilet it or let it dissolve in the shower . . . then he could create a fact about himself that Jim didn’t know. He could take away one of Jim’s levers.

It wasn’t much.

He was going to have to quit using, eventually. Every junkie knows he has to quit eventually; it’s only that as fast as the date approaches, so quickly it recedes again.

He had left the prepped syringe on the kitchen table. The laptop had gone to sleep so he touched a key to wake it. In the screen’s light, the syringe cast a low ominous shadow as if in an old-fashioned anti-drug movie — except no laptops in those, of course. Sherlock held the syringe over the sink and depressed the plunger; then he lay down on the bed to wait.

*

The edge of the sink was so cool against his forehead. That helped. But then the toilet. Sherlock hated to puke into a toilet; having his face so near the bowl only made the nausea worse.

Bathtub. Puke into the bathtub.

What time was it what time was it what time was it —

Still dark. The laptop clock read 3:13. Montague Street empty: everyone gone home gone to ground gone to rest.

He gathered up the crumpled loo paper from the floor and flushed it away. There was a package of four rolls under the bathroom sink but he had gone through one entire roll, wiping his eyes and nose and mouth, already. He tried to consider the question whether Jim would be suspicious if he asked for an extra package this week; how long was the runny nose meant to last? He couldn’t remember that from rehab, probably because once the cramps and the trots started they subsumed awareness of everything else. Another thing to consider: If the cramps started soon, would they end sooner, or would an early start only mean a longer bout of cramps?

This wasn’t going so well, was it.

Were the diagnostic criteria for depression altered in cases like his? “My case,” Sherlock said aloud, because the lights were still out everywhere, so Jim couldn’t hear him: “My case is unique,” but then he started to cry. Or not to cry, exactly; water drained from his eyes but there was no hitching breath. No particular feeling attached, either. So perhaps merely Eyes Watering, Part II: The (Temporarily) Dry Nose.

If Jim twigged. If Jim somehow knew he had dumped the evening dose, if Jim ever caught him palming the supply.

Still black all the way to the horizon. Laptop: five o’clock exactly.

The kinds of twilight were astronomical twilight, naval twilight, civil twilight. Astronomical twilight was the most like night, whereas civil twilight was the most like day. Sherlock looked out the window again. No, he had just done that. There was still no twilight, of any kind.

Vomit again. Vomit vomit vomit. Bile. Saliva rope, viscous, shining between his chin and the hand he had just wiped his mouth with. Disgusting. And now the sweat. He took off his clothes: he could shower later but sweat-soaked clothes would be a giveaway.

He could shower now. Good idea, should have occurred to him earlier. Hot water, comforting. But bits of puke still in the tub. Sit on a stool. Hot water to wash the puke away, wash over him, wash him away.

That helped. The chills abated.

When the hot water ran out Sherlock wrapped himself in a towel and paced. Nothing was coming up anymore, which was just as well; he cleaned his teeth and drank some water; kept the water down.

Nautical twilight now, but the electricity still hadn’t come on. Cramp. He stumbled to the toilet and got himself seated. When he ran the edge of one hand down his back, sweat sheeted off: his hand hydroplaned like a car braked too sharply in heavy rain.

The next time the spasms abated, Sherlock got up and went to the window again: civil twilight. There was still no mains power. Laptop, 7:08. The battery was down to 18 percent. He noticed that he was naked, which probably explained the shivering unless he was just having another bout of chills. He found the discarded towel, laid it over his shoulders, and resumed pacing. Time was a narrowing road; foolish, he had been foolish, passing this wretched night to no purpose. A fully charged phone, a wind-up clock, a whole bloody generator: one way or another Jim would have his organization running. In less than two hours the minion would appear no matter what the state of London’s electrical grid. It wasn’t nearly enough time for Sherlock to get to the point of being able to fake a damned thing. He lay down again on the bed and put his face in his hands; civil twilight became full day.

*

He finished dressing himself just before the doorbell rang. The heroin-delivery minion looked at him hard.

“I was fixing just when the lights went out,” Sherlock said. “Wound up losing the whole dose.” He was leaning some of his weight against the doorjamb; he thought his face was probably gray. His upper lip was wet but he resisted the urge to wipe it.

Normally the minion didn’t react to Sherlock in any way, but this morning the power was still out, so he gave a contemptuous little _tch_ before he left. Sherlock barely heard it. He had his cotton, his candle, his tourniquet, and his spoon all ready, so there was no delay.

*

When he woke up, it was already noon, and the power was back on. He was very tired. He took a cup of coffee downstairs with him when he opened the shop.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jim's Montague Street building exists only in my imagination, but Google Street View shows one near the Russell Square end of the street that looks like an annex to the building just south of it, and that, conveniently, would be perfect if it had a shop window punched in the facade. This makes me unreasonably happy.
> 
> For Sherlock's withdrawal, I drew on a number of first-person accounts I found online. I learned about the three kinds of twilight from the Yearly Sun Graph for London, which you can find [here](https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london). The Sun Graph is the coolest thing _ever;_ go see!


	5. Demonstration Project

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jim decides to expand Sherlock's horizons.

Jim put his head around the door before Sherlock had been at his desk an hour. “A little bird told me you had a rough night, so I canceled your afternoon clients for you,” he said. “Want to take a guess who this is?”

“This” was a man in a boiler suit, staring at the floor and carrying a toolbox and a heavy-duty extension cord.

“Electrician,” Sherlock said; then his long-overtaxed governor failed, so that what he heard himself say next was “Obviously, and not one of your direct reports but an employee of a firm whose owner you control. I take it there will be no more power outages.”

Jim’s mouth made a surprised O although the rest of his face didn’t change. “Testy! Well, I can understand — all those hours spent sadly jonesing away. And me with such a treat for you.”

They were playing a new game, then: call it Feisty Vassal. A relief that it had not immediately resulted in Sherlock’s being taken somewhere to be tortured to death.  He was worn far too thin to work out whether Jim had planned to inaugurate Feisty Vassal, this afternoon, or whether he himself had elicited it. Either way: “I’m agog with anticipation,” he said, stepping onto the tightrope. Hateful, how the autonomic nervous system was not to be subdued. He must have spent half the night in one kind of cold sweat, and now on came another.

“Well, Will — doesn’t that sound funny? Well, Will, well will wellwill. Something like a birdcall. I think? I don’t know that much about birds. _Anyway,_ I bet you’d love to go for a walk.”

What?

_Open the front door, step into the doorway, proceed along the pavement; air on every side. No wall at his back, no wall before him. Choose to go right, go left, enter the park, enter a shop, leave the shop, cross the street. The traffic._

Sherlock was horrified to hear his breath whistle in his tightened throat.

There were three reasons why he had not yet escaped: The difficulty of getting heroin. The wish to avoid starring in one of Jim’s videos. The evidence implicating him in Niall’s murder. Three reasons: so he had thought; it hadn’t occurred to him that with the gaoler holding open the door of his cell and bowing him out, a prisoner might hold fast to the thought of enclosure, the thought of how he might fold himself up with his arms wrapped around his legs and, as long as he did what he was told, he would be safe.

“Aw, don’t worry, I’ll come with you,” Jim said.  “Go on, get your jacket.” Someone without Sherlock’s knowledge base would surely have thought he sounded encouraging and friendly. Not for the first time, Sherlock wondered how Jim experienced himself; as a voice that echoed over empty space, perhaps.

*

Worse than the fear was the gratitude. They walked the perimeter of Russell Square, hands in pockets. Jim was at Sherlock’s left, so Sherlock’s right hand was free to dig thumbnail into pad of index finger, as prophylaxis against running into the road or dropping to the pavement and pressing himself into it until he disappeared. A part of him was listening to Jim; a part of him marveled that everything important about Jim should be invisible. Bright-eyed Jim Moriarty strolled the perimeter of Russell Square: would none of the prey among whom he prowled stop dead, turn side to side, head tilted, to sniff the air?

Jim said, “I knew you’d be good at it.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Sherlock replied, with perfect truth.

“Aaaaaaand, you know, this has been kind of a probation thing we had going on, so far.”

“You did say something like that, yes.” Sherlock made his tone dry: _Feisty Vassal,_ after all. _(Feisty Vassal Escapes Death. Feisty Vassal Lives to Tell Fortunes Another Day. Feisty Vassal Puts One Foot in Front of the Other, Eternally, Whilst Circumambulating Russell Square.)_

“It would have been such a waste, last night. Cutting and running, I mean. But you didn’t do it, and that makes me think we can call the job permanent now.”

“Oh! Will there be a rise in salary?” Testing the tightrope, testing — Jim glanced at him sidelong; had the rope just sagged? Sherlock winked at Jim: _We’re both in on the joke. Right?_

Right. “Not _exactly._ What you get at this point in your career, Will, is a perk.”

_Not a video not a video let it not be someone to make into a video —_

“Time off! And plenty of it. No more Monday counseling service, Tuesday counseling service, Wednesday counseling service. Thursdays, Fridays, and weekends only. And pretty soon we’re going to be adding some variety to your weekend nights.”

“I am _agog._ ” Still on the tightrope. Feisty Vassals were loyal to their feudal lords, were they not? Their very feistiness demonstrated their allegiance; their affection, even.

“You’re moving on to big things now. Well, not _big_ things, not yet. _Medium_ things.”

Sherlock dragged hysteria back down inside himself and stepped on it, hard.

“Still, it’s a promotion and I know you’ll see it that way. The really big things are coming soon. Sooner than you think.

“And, Will? Get some exercise. Go for a walk, whatever, get back in shape. I know it’s been hard on you, staying inside all this time.”

“Oh,” said Sherlock, “it’s Christmas!”

“It totally is! Just remember” — Jim pivoted and stepped in front of Sherlock, stopping him in his tracks — “you can run away from a lot of things, but you can’t run away from yourself _._ ”

“Or, of course, from you?”

“That’s exactly where I was going with that thought! How’d you guess?”

*

Two weeks and a couple of days later, on a Saturday night in mid-September, Will Holmes, aficionado of art and assistant-to-be of the powerful and shady — although they didn’t know that yet — stepped out of the lift, let the double glass door of the Hove Gallery be opened before him, and made his debut.

To spot the target would have been easy, even if Sherlock hadn’t seen his photograph, because Rockham was so exactly a _type_ : Master of the Universe, in middle age. A slab of well-marbled beef, redder in the face than seemed consistent with healthy blood pressure, genial in the way that dissolved the instant anyone obstructed the least of his wishes — in that last quality, he resembled Jim. And a suit, of course bespoke, cut to just the same degree of flash as Sherlock’s good off-the-rack, because Jim  judged, probably correctly, that Rockham would notice the affinity and so identify Sherlock as, though lower-ranking, one of his own.

Jim had had a stylist cut Sherlock’s hair and slick it back; at the time, Sherlock thought the result might scream “operator” a little _too_ loudly but now, looking around at the crowd, he reevaluated. Academic types, yes, lots; arty types, ditto; and also plenty of money here to declare its ownership of the expensive investments hanging on the walls. Jim chose social markers well; Sherlock wasn’t as good as Andrew Rockham and Jim Moriarty were at appearing congenial, but the slick hair and the suit would, he thought, make up for any shortfall. He looked like money that was ready to make more money. He looked like money that relished the association with art. Art appreciated, and Will Holmes appreciated it right back.

Sherlock watched the currents of the room for a while, seeing how they flowed around Rockham, noting where Rockham’s attention lingered, to whom and what it returned. The people in the room who weren’t rich investors mainly gave him a wide berth, but Masters of the Universe always thought they were sexy even if they weren’t, and those in their vicinity usually picked up on the vibe even if they didn’t like it. There was a certain amount of appreciativeness aimed Rockham’s way. Not all of it was unwilling, not all of it came from women, and most of those feeling it would probably have denied it. _Slimy bastard,_ Sherlock could hear them say. Shuddering elaborately. Well, they weren’t wrong.

Rockham’s habits, as documented by the _Mirror_ and the _Sun,_ were demonstratively heterosexual — tonight, indeed, he had accessorized with someone blond, who just at present was allowing her skillfully-augmented breasts to brush along his arm while he moved one puffy hand in slow circles against her arse — but he also had a long history of what the _Times_ politely called “disinhibited chatter” about various handsome celebrities’ charms and presumed inclination to fellate him. Now, seeing where Rockham’s gaze fell, Sherlock thought he would have been satisfied to take up any of the better-looking men on the invitation they absolutely weren’t giving. It was not pleasant to be grateful to Jim, but Sherlock was grateful that even if Rockham proved to find him attractive, sexual overtures had been explicitly ruled out: “His lays are good for six months, max,” Jim had said. “They’re fungible. You, on the other hand, are gonna be long-term and indispensable.”

Well, that was enough of observing; time to begin the approach. Will Holmes took a turn around the room. It wouldn’t do to rush, and besides it was . . . an odd feeling to be among so many people all at once. Sherlock had got used again, mostly, to walking outdoors, selves and eyes everywhere, yes, but passing quickly and then gone; he was walking miles upon miles these days, between fixes, getting himself back into condition.

It had been a shock to discover, when Jim left him back at the shop after that casual friendly mentoring-rich stroll, that he was tired out. Partly that was because Jim’s company, Jim’s attention, was — well, it was best faced with every sense attuned to all signals that might come one’s way; perhaps that was how one might most clearly put the case — anyway, fifteen minutes of Jim in certain moods was enough to leave one sweating and trembling. He was spending more time with Sherlock now, what with the shopping for Will Holmes’s suits, shirts, shoes, what with the need to decide how Will might present himself the better to become indispensable to Andy Rockham. It was bad. It was . . . very bad, Sherlock admitted to himself. And Jim hadn’t even been in one of _those_ moods. There hadn’t been any videos in weeks.

. . . On exhibit were twenty-four photographs. Sherlock had seen most of them before, or rather had seen images of them, as part of his education in Rockham’s collecting habits.

_“Not that he cares about aaaaaaaaaaart,” Jim had said, “but he does like to be important, so he does whatever he thinks important people do.”_

_“You haven’t”—Sherlock felt his way—“invested all this time and money in me for the sake of an art scam.”_

_“Clever boots.” Beaming now, fond and proud. “What’s an art scam worth? A few hundred thousand pounds in sales, maybe a million if your goods are convincing and it takes a while before the skeptics turn up and start to make annoying noises about the grain of the wood in the panel and what boring craftsman was making what pigments in what hideous backwater in 1583, and on and on, ugh, and then you, the broker of all those nasty fakes, wind up in jail and you’re no use to me at all anymore. No no no, gorgeous clever Will, I’ve got much bigger plans in mind.”_

_Sherlock found it almost a relief to confirm, once again, that his value to Jim was purely a matter of the uses to which he might be put. “And those are . . .”_

_“Well . . . I’ll put it this way: Mr. Rockham’s got a line in heavy equipment.”_

_What, Sherlock wondered, did Jim believe Will might have qualms about? A likely answer came to him immediately — but not now not now not with Jim watching. “I gather I wouldn’t learn anything of real importance by Googling him.”_

_Jim made a prissy face and popped his gum by way of punctuation. “You’ll find out everything you need to know._ When I tell you _.”_

_“Duly noted,” Sherlock said. It was wonderful, how accomplished he had become in the skill of keeping the irony out of his voice._

The prints Sherlock studied now were bigger and crisper than the images he’d seen before, of course, but the extraordinary thing about them wasn’t their high technical quality, it was this: the photographer, who was also responsible for the objects depicted, might have cropped the pictures, or chosen her angle to show their subjects to maximum effect, but they had not been retouched and the objects really did exist.

Or was “objects” the right word? Sherlock had found himself in front of a triptych. The artist — her name was Jill Rosenzweig — had gathered thousands and thousands of leaves and sorted them from green to driest brown, then laid them out, overlapped like scales, to make a ribbon of color, with high summer at one end and cold oncoming at the other. Rosenzweig had photographed the result of her labors early on, then again at the halfway point, and last when she had finished. There was no photo showing the ribbon complete, because at each stage some of the leaves had already blown away. It was — incomprehensible, really. The gathering and sorting alone must have taken days, and the ribbon of fading color, meticulous, why make such an ephemeral thing at all? Sherlock had read over all the art-press coverage of Rosenzweig’s earlier work and he had a vocabulary ready to impress Rockham with, if it proved useful to turn the conversation that way, but now he found himself inventorying the species she had used and gauging the wind speed and direction from the disturbances in the leaves. He moved on to the next photo, and was rooted to the spot.

Fourteen boulders. Rough oblongs and rough near-oblongs. The stone black against blue-green water streaked with egg-blue, below bird-blue sky. Land dropped away behind. The stones stood in equipoise, like dancers _en pointe,_ angle against angle, corner against center, with triangles of vista between them. Their weights, the lines of force, just so: could you collapse them with a fingertip, or might they balance still, stone in air, a century from now?

What was this, why were his palms wet. He had got used to Jim — all right, not used to Jim, exactly, but used to this life, used to its shape, its limits, its conveniences and the small liberties he had been permitted since the blackout. It was hard to remember, now that several weeks had passed, what the point of attempting to quit heroin had been. A delusional exercise. _Of course_ a night wasn’t long enough to get through the pukes and the shakes. _Of course_ even if that miracle had happened, he’d never have been able to decide, morning after morning after morning, for as long as Jim owned him — for the rest of his life, that meant — not to throw himself into the sanctuary-by-the-dose brought helpfully to his door sometimes even before he had brushed his teeth. 

The name of the photograph was _Balanced Stones #1 (1979)_. Banal. Sherlock identified what he felt as longing, and then he closed his eyes for a moment and turned away. He didn’t allow himself to focus on any of the other photographs; across the room, Rockham was braying with laughter. Time to hobnob, then. In a moment, as soon as his hands were steady.

He drifted toward Rockham, casting smiles about him; no one here knew him, of course, but that didn’t matter if you were good-looking and rich enough. Sherlock was the one and his suit declared, a little loudly, that he was en route to becoming the other, so a high percentage of those present had already given him the eye, and not all of them were subtle about it, either. Rockham, observant like all predators — and like all prey — saw Will Holmes’s clothes, his walk, the gracious acknowledgment of the crowd’s interest, all the beacons signaling _I am heading for money_ and _I know what to do with power_ and, specifically, signaling to Rockham _I am like you,_ and Rockham’s expression now was speculative ...

Sherlock slid into the fraction of airspace between Rockham’s right side and the nearest courtier. “Will Holmes,” he said. “We share an interest in Ms. Rosenzweig’s work, I gather.”

They shook hands; Rockham held on too long, not flirting but making a performance of his strength. Wasn’t the handshake meant to be a show of _non_ aggression? So the trick would be to manifest deference without weakness, to claim Rockham’s attention as if by right but without issuing a challenge. _Meet your trusted advisor,_ Sherlock thought. He let his hand drop and said: “Actually, I’m looking for a job, and I think you’ve got the job that I should fill.”

It was a gamble, but people must constantly have been trying to climb Rockham’s ladder, and Sherlock’s bet was that every last one pretended they were only interested in the view.

“But I haven’t got any jobs available,” Rockham said, and _yes_ : because Rockham’s tone was not entirely flat, and he didn’t turn away. His eyes were sharp on Sherlock’s face. Neither of them looked at the blond woman on his other arm.

“Pick a person in this room,” Sherlock replied, “and give me five minutes. Then see if that situation changes.”

Rockham gave the blond woman’s bum a final pat and detached himself from her. Sherlock let a piece of his attention follow her stroll over to the drinks table, just in case. He had a moment of fellow-feeling: navigating Rockham’s whims might be less dangerous than navigating Jim’s, but job security was equally lacking. “Melinda,” Rockham said. “I pick Melinda.”

 _Melinda?_ Rockham hadn’t moved his gaze, hadn’t pointed, hadn’t — Oh, he was a clever man, clever indeed. He had, of course, picked the one person in the room whom he could be almost entirely confident Sherlock didn’t already know. Precisely: the blonde.

The performance would be more impressive if Sherlock didn’t look her way, so he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “To begin with, her real name isn’t Melinda. She’s Eastern European, Polish or Czech I would guess — ”

“Gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, fucking me for money so from one of the less economically powerful EU states. I thought you were trying to impress me.”

Sherlock smiled. “She saves most of the money you give her for clothes — she’s worked out that though your own tailoring is bespoke, you haven’t a clue about women’s attire, she knows her position with you is a temporary one, and she’s thinking ahead, building up a nest egg for the weary days of middle age.”

Rockham darted a glance at not-Melinda, and his eyebrows rose.

“You see how her dress doesn’t hang quite smoothly? That’s the less-than-perfect bias cut. And from close up you’ll find that the seams don’t lie flat,” Sherlock said. “So now you do know something about women’s clothing. Call that an informational aperitif.

“She’s aware that you’re aware that she’s shagging you for money, of course, but while one can’t call her attachment to you heartfelt, she does her job honestly. You noticed that she didn’t pout or linger when you dismissed her? She thinks of you as her employer and she is exactly as sentimental as any other well-paid temporary member of staff.

“As for you: you like her well enough, but as you might like any other household convenience, and you like novelty; you’re tiring of her presence in your bed, otherwise you might not have dismissed her so readily to talk to a complete stranger who, after all, is trying to sell you something, and salesmen are such a bore. But I recommend that when you dismiss her as your arm candy you make it your business to find her a permanent post. Foresight, realism, an eye for the significant detail: she’ll do well almost anywhere. She may even be grateful to you, in which case you’ll find yourself in the unusual position of having succeeded in buying someone’s loyalty. Congratulations.”

“Well,” Rockham said, after a moment. “That’s ... reasonably astute, if it turns out to be true. And — again, if it turns out to be true — I can see why your skills might prove useful. Not easy to verify claims about the inside of her head, though, is it.”

“No,” Sherlock agreed, “it’s not, but why don’t you look into her finances? Check my work that far and you might develop some confidence in the rest.”

“Oh, I’ll check, you’d best believe it. And — Will, is it? I’ll be looking into you, too. I might find, say, that you and Melinda are already acquainted. In which case — ”

“But you won’t find that,” Sherlock put in, “because we’re not. Here’s my card; do your worst.” He nodded toward not-Melinda, and then toward Rockham, and turned to go.

“A moment,” said Rockham, with an edge. “I’m not done. Why, exactly, did you come looking for me tonight? Me, as opposed to any other entrepreneur, and tonight, rather than any other time?”

“Second question first: tonight, because this is a public event so I had a hope of approaching you without your bodyguard grinding my face into the pavement and kicking my ribs in. First question second: you, because I have researched you, and I know that you sometimes do business with persons who can’t be properly background checked. Therefore another avenue of insight would be worth a great deal to you. Even a fraction of that great deal, directed my way, equals a lot of money. I like my face, I like my ribs, and I like money. Will those answers serve?”

Rockham had begun to laugh. “They might.” He wove Sherlock’s card through his fingers, the distraction in a beginner’s magic trick. “We’ll see.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't want to use a real living artist in this fic, but Jill Rosenzweig, whose work Sherlock is unwillingly moved by, is based closely on [Andy Goldsworthy](http://visualmelt.com/Andy-Goldsworthy), who is ... well, go look, and be amazed.


	6. Disruption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was never going to get away, and the best he could hope for was that when Jim was done with him the end would come with him kneeling somewhere anonymous with his hands tied behind his back, and a bullet to the brain: perhaps Jim had that much sentiment.

Sherlock unlocked the door at Montague Street to find Jim seated at the kitchen table with a china cup steaming in front of him. He peeled the transmitter off his collarbone; the residue of adhesive itched. “Tea for two?”

“Nah,” Jim said, “you shouldn’t have caffeine late at night, it’s no good for you.”

“Keeping me around for a bit longer, then?” Sherlock asked, as lightly as he could manage. It was past eleven; the delivery would have arrived an hour ago, on a normal evening, and the first whispers of anxiety had begun drifting through him. He looked around the room. There, on the counter.

“Hey, that was a good first outing, but Don’t. Get. Cocky. All right?”

Better to look as though fixing were not a matter of urgency, or to act in accordance with what he and Jim both knew? Probably there was nothing to be gained by any show of resistance. Sherlock began assembling his works.

“That divorce is going to be a bitch, I know,” Jim said, watching him depress the plunger.

“Sorry?” But Jim’s meaning was obvious, of course, and Sherlock should have seen this coming: he could hardly play aide-de-camp to Andrew Rockham while absenting himself at scheduled intervals to shoot up. The relief of fixing evaporated, but he managed a nod and a shrug. “Needs must.”

“See? Even as a junkie, you’re quick. Imagine what heights you can aspire to once I get you cleaned up.”

 _I don’t need you to tell me I’m quick,_ Sherlock didn’t say, resentful and contemptuous of at least one of the people in the room. He said something else, which was “When?,” and tried to keep the fear out of his tone.

“Let’s say Monday, hm? You can have the weekend to make your sad farewells.”

*

Usually Sherlock drifted toward his bed shortly after the evening fix, but that night after Jim left he found himself wide awake, dread frigid in him. He rubbed at his sternum, folded his arms around himself, stood at the window watching late passersby. _Monday._ This would make the fourth time he had stopped using, if he counted the night of the blackout. Twice there had been stints in rehab facilities, with their odious group therapy and their exhortations somehow both sincere and counterfeit. How did the people telling one to assume responsibility for one’s life always manage to strike exactly the same pious note? _We know, we understand, we’ve been there,_ and with the piety also the relief, clanging loud, _I am not like you anymore_ no matter how often they claimed to be _in recovery too._

There was this to be said: in rehab, they gave you different drugs so as to mitigate the effects of withdrawal from the drugs you preferred. Sherlock knew Jim too well by now to imagine that mercy would be offered him; far too much fun to be had in watching someone writhe and snivel, even when Jim wasn’t producing those effects with any tools he wielded himself. Sherlock was going to beg, and Jim was going to enjoy his begging; there was nothing more to say about that.

Eventually lying down in the dark seemed as if it might be an improvement over standing at the window in the dark, so Sherlock did.

*

Lying down in the dark was not an improvement, and calling to mind the experience of rehab had been a mistake, because now the memory of Sherlock’s last conversation with Mycroft — no, of the last lecture Mycroft had delivered to him — was playing on a loop:

_“Shall I itemize, Sherlock, these latest in a long, long series of last straws?_

_“First, our mother’s brother, who largely raised her, suffers grave injuries in a car accident and, after a week in hospital, must be allowed to die. But from her younger son, whom she adores, she hears not a word during this time. Much less does he appear in person to comfort her._

_“Next, we come to the funeral. Is it fair to say that our father and I implored you to attend? Yes, I think ‘implore’ is just the right word._

_“I really think you could have hurt our mother quite enough to satisfy even the cruelest temperament, simply by failing to show up. But to use your family’s absence from home as an opportunity to pillage the place — that was excessive, surely._

_“That you pawned your mother’s jewelry to buy heroin is hardly worth mentioning, except for the small matter of your nearly killing yourself with an overdose the very next day. And, you know, I think our parents might have forgiven you even that. But I am very, very tired of watching them stagger from blow after blow._

_“Have your shot at rehab now, Sherlock, and then — fuck off. You’ve done more than enough damage. So fuck right off.”_

It was a question, Sherlock supposed, how much of all that Mycroft had actually said, and how much he himself had confabulated out of tones of voice, sentences half remembered, his own guilt. Mycroft saying “fuck,” for example, saying it twice: that was implausible.

That second and final stint in rehab, though, he could hardly forget. There was the poorly hidden pessimism of the staff, of course — Mycroft had said _something,_ of that Sherlock was certain, something in someone’s hearing, maybe something to someone directly, and anyway there followed white blank day after white blank day after white blank day, and no one came to visit him, which would, even to the meanest mind, have been a _clue._

_Support from sober friends and family can make all the difference in your recovery. Don’t be afraid to ask for help._

That had been in a pamphlet; Sherlock read it more than once during those white days, because more than occasionally there was absolutely nothing else to do.

_“Oh, what do you care? They love you best. They always have done; there’s no need for me even to pretend it matters what I do that they might be proud of —”_

Mycroft had said that to him, or he had said it to Mycroft; curiously, Sherlock could no longer remember which.

*

Sherlock slept fitful and uneasy and when morning broke in wet gray smudges he gave up and made coffee. The messenger with his delivery was late, which happened sometimes but now it was happening after Jim had told him _Monday Monday Monday_ and what if Jim had decided to bring the Divorce forward, _Surprise!,_ because why not, it was exactly the sort of thing he’d find amusing, in a small way, not as much as shooting someone in the kneecaps, of course, or the less sensuous but more intellectually satisfying project of building a criminal empire, still one takes one’s pleasures where one finds them, and by the time Sherlock’s doorbell rang, twelve minutes and approximately thirty-nine seconds late by the laptop clock, he was trembling and had barely a cuticle to his name.

He had expected to nod off, after his restless night, but the jitters took him over; the options were to pace the flat wringing his hands or to go for a walk. A walk offered at least the possibility of distraction, but the choice of where to go was beyond him. He could have tossed a coin, heads north tails south, if Jim had ever given him access to cash.

_I am never going to get away._

He was never going to get away, and the best he could hope for was that when Jim was done with him the end would come with him kneeling somewhere anonymous with his hands tied behind his back, and a bullet to the brain: perhaps Jim had that much sentiment. Perhaps. It was much too easy to imagine quite different scenarios, most of which ended with himself as the subject of one of Jim’s home movies.

He had to stop thinking.

_Walk._

He had no coin to toss but he could follow first one walker, then another, then another. Choose by the color spectrum, why not? Red garment, then orange garment, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. It was as good a way to randomize as any other. He would end who knew where — that, it struck him, made a neat summation of his prospects in general. In rehab someone would have asked, with that sweet-toned sympathy that made him feel as though he had just bitten down on a piece of aluminium foil, _Does that resonate for you?_ Certain they knew the answer, of course.

He had trailed a red-scarfed woman no farther than Montague Place before a man in a safety-orange jacket appeared, heading west. Sherlock peeled off from Red Scarf to follow him; the jacket was like a lantern in the crowd. They were nearly at the Tottenham Court Road when it occurred to Sherlock that he was not following his plan of action, for several people wearing garments yellow at least in part had passed.

 _No,_ he thought, warring stupidly against himself, _I don’t have to do that, I can do something else instead,_ and he went on following the jacket-beacon. The jacket moved fast, threading through the morning crowds, northward now; though Sherlock quickened his pace to follow, Orange Jacket was only a flash here and there. Sherlock staggered, caught himself on a bollard, found Orange Jacket again, well ahead, near vanishing.

The thought floated up in the back of his mind that _Pursue Orange Jacket_ was the first self-assigned task he had had in months.

Contemptibly trivial though it was.

 _Quickly now._ Past featureless towers and Superdrug and Hotel Chocolat, past mobile phone shops and mattress specialists and Itsu Japanese takeaway, past all the things that were no different from any other things — _So many exhausted possibilities,_ Sherlock might have thought, had he been given to lofty thought; then suddenly Orange Jacket was visible in full, a hundred meters off and across the way from a longish interval of handsome red brick, aiming himself through heavy traffic at the Warren Street tube station; and now Sherlock did have a thought:

_If I were superstitious I might call this a sign._

The idea was an obvious one and had come to him months before: a reliable method that even Jim couldn’t keep from him.

If he were caught jumping the gate it would probably get back to Jim, but Sherlock’s mind’s eye showed him the crowded ticket hall, the Oyster card machines, the brevity of the wait to spot someone unwary whose card he could pilfer without the attendant’s noticing; the task, he now saw, had never really been _Follow Orange Jacket,_ it had been to walk until he, Sherlock, was _ready._

He was ready. It would all go quickly. Down and done. The train’s operator would likely never see him anyway. It would not do to think of those on the platform watching, so Sherlock didn’t think of them.

He fastened his gaze on the station entrance and stepped off the curb.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Warren Street tube station is on the Northern and Victoria lines, which are partially automated and  
> [don’t have drivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_of_the_London_Underground), though an operator opens and closes the doors; that’s why Sherlock figures the operator is unlikely to see him jump.


	7. Team Dynamics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The meeting had not devolved into a shouting match, or at least not yet; there was that much to be said, although the Assistant Undersecretary for Operational Effectiveness had, over the past half hour, acquired quite a remarkable stabbing pain in his temples.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris) is always terrific, but with this chapter she went above and beyond. To the extent that you find you're not reading two thousand words of info-dump, thank her!

The meeting had not devolved into a shouting match, or at least not yet; there was that much to be said, although the Assistant Undersecretary for Operational Effectiveness had, over the past half hour, acquired quite a remarkable stabbing pain in his temples. “The most likely significance of all this evidence — ” he began, but was cut off by the Foreign Secretary, who could not seem to keep it in his head that the Assistant Undersecretary was only fictively his junior:

“It makes no sense to destabilize a nation where so much laundered money is, literally and figuratively, banked.”

“Where else can the facts lead us?” Mycroft replied, letting his exasperation show, because Hareton’s confusion about their relative ranks must be dispelled. “Once again: Consider the American election. Consider the evidence surrounding the Brexit vote. Consider the attempts to influence the vote in both Germany and France. Consider, in particular, the attempted coup in Montenegro.”

“Any attempt to make of the UK a colony — ” Here the Foreign Secretary broke off.

Mycroft beamed at him. “Exactly so, Mr. Hareton.” The only pleasure to be had in any council that included the Foreign Secretary was that of making him think he had said the opposite of what he meant. As what Hareton meant was usually idiotic, this had the knock-on effect of improving the quality of the discussion. “I think we can all cite many examples of colonies geographically remote from the motherland.”

The Home Secretary, whose grandfather had been born in Lahore and who unlike the majority of her compeers owed none of her professional success to her ancestry, momentarily became even more expressionless than usual. Walter Hareton, who besides being dull-witted had far too many tells for a career diplomat, picked up his pen and tapped his lip with it, thereby conveying that Mycroft had succeeded in cowing him. The others in attendance — the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Organisation, the Minister of Defence, and the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary — simply looked unhappy and waited for the Assistant Undersecretary for Operational Effectiveness to continue speaking.

Mycroft moved the corners of his lips to acknowledge their expectancy, and went on. “ _As I have been saying,_ however, a military invasion is not on the cards. I believe Mr. Skeffings will agree with me on that point?”

The Defence Minister nodded meekly.

“Mr. Putin’s aims are more easily accomplished,” Mycroft went on, “if he can push Europe and the UK into tearing ourselves apart. So far his manipulations of public opinion and of political processes are succeeding admirably. But although I am certain of the general form the next stage will take, we remain in the dark with respect to the specifics of how he means to achieve it.” He turned to the chairman of the JIO. “Tell us, please, how many of your most valuable agents in place have been arrested and executed in the past six months.”

“At least four,” the chairman replied sourly; “five, if the silence from our man in the Russian Defence Ministry means what I think we all suspect it does.”

“And as we all have learned over the past year, the Americans can no longer be trusted with our intelligence nor relied on to share theirs. Have our friends the French and the Germans anything to offer, Mr. Macdermid?”

The JIO chair looked even more irritated. “You know the answer to that question as well as you knew the answer to the one previous: they are faring no better.”

“Mr. Holmes,” said Cyril de la Pole, sounding desperate. The Prime Minister’s secretary had spent most of his career preparing briefing papers and thus remained touchingly naïve, to the extent that he believed himself well suited to the role of skeptic. “Mr. Holmes. Surely you overstate the threat.”

“Do you think so?” Mycroft replied. “Then let me walk you through my analysis once again.

“One. Putin has been selling his people a version of the Stab in the Back for years now.

“Two. His irredentism we have already seen him act on in Crimea.

“Three. Russia is conducting military exercises near its borders with the Baltic states.

“Four. These small and militarily weak nations were vassals of the USSR, and Putin would like nothing better than to see them vassal states — and buffers against invasion from the west — once more.

“Five. Russia perceives NATO not as a defensive organization but as a positive threat: indeed, it is largely on account of NATO’s expansion eastward that Putin and his Foreign Ministry wish so urgently to reinstate Russia’s buffer zone.

“And six. Splinter NATO, and it’s off to the races.

“Now consider, if you please, the present condition of the United States, and that of Hungary, and that of Poland, and tell me again that I overstate the threat to the rest of Europe and to the UK.” Mycroft smiled and leaned back, soft as silk, hands folded over his waistcoat.

An hour ago they had all, even Ellis Macdermid the JIO chairman, been reluctant to believe; but now Saundra Zardari’s poker face had failed her, Walter Hareton had put his pen down and moved on to rubbing his lip, and Alastair Skeffings the Defence Secretary was staring at the table. Macdermid had tucked his chin into his chest. De la Pole looked at them, and looked at Mycroft, and then the air went out of him. _Finally._

“As I have said,” Mycroft resumed, “the logical next step is to provoke outright civil disorder in as many of the NATO states as possible. What we lack, thanks to what I might call either the colossal failures of our intelligence services” — here the JIO chairman rolled his eyes; he really was not bad at the double act — “or the stupendous success of the Russians’, is any inkling of how they intend to proceed toward it.

“A world of possibilities thus opens before us. Perhaps they will arm one of our more rabid racialist organizations. But with conventional weapons? Or, perhaps, with a biological weapon. Or a dirty bomb. They might mount a series of terrorist attacks purportedly by adherents of the group pleased to call itself the Islamic State, for example. Or they might facilitate a series of actual such attacks.

“However” — Mycroft nodded to Macdermid — “it appears that any planning is being conducted offline. Our electronic eavesdropping has picked up only the barest hints, nothing concrete. Without agents in place, we are deaf and blind. We do not even know where we ought to direct our chief efforts to cultivate informants.”

“Increased domestic surveillance, intensified border checks — ” de la Pole began.

The Home Secretary forestalled him. “Useful measures — up to a point. But resources are limited even in a police state. Additionally, the nearer we approach the quality of a police state, the more likely we are to see precisely the social breakdown against which Mr. Holmes is warning us.”

“I am constrained to agree with Ms. Zardari,” said Macdermid. “To cultivate specific well-placed informants is one thing, but to encourage all to inform against all . . .”

There was a pause while those present contemplated the examples of East Germany and of the USSR under Stalin.

“We can increase our scrutiny of goods shipments,” Mycroft said when he considered they had had sufficient time to meditate upon the drawbacks of totalitarianism. “Subject, of course, to the same resource constraints as universal surveillance would entail. But as we have no inkling of what we’re looking for, or whether, indeed, it will arrive in material form . . .”

Another silence fell; again, Mycroft broke it. “You all” — he let his glance skip over the Prime Minister’s secretary — “know what to do. Repair your broken intelligence networks. Develop new informants. Assign your best people to examine the reports and surveillance data we do have. My specialists are of course hard at work; I and they shall require frequent updates from you. Let us hope for the gift of sufficient time to avert whatever catastrophe Mr. Putin and his agents have planned for us.

“That concludes this meeting.”

“One more thing, Mr. Holmes,” said the Foreign Secretary, breaking into the rustles and creaks as the others began to reassemble themselves. Saundra Zardari’s phone quietly sang its Android-booting-up song. At Hareton’s words, they all paused. The phone finished its song.

Mycroft tilted his head invitingly.

Hareton looked gratified — of course, Mycroft reflected, the Home Secretary was out of his line of sight, so he couldn’t see her close her eyes and blow a silent breath out of her pursed lips. “This nation,” Hareton continued, “has granted you an enormous amount of covert authority — this, on the basis of your” — here he assumed an ironic mien — “unique intellect, wide-ranging knowledge, and unparalleled ability to extract accurate information from limited and ambiguous evidence.”

Irony having been exercised, the Foreign Secretary now enacted gravitas. Interesting how some people were equally incompetent in every respect.

“Since you cannot tell us,” Hareton said, “exactly how the Russians mean to carry out this alleged existential threat against us, then can you tell us what, precisely, we keep you in your exalted position _for_?”

On second thought, all-round extreme incompetence was not interesting but merely tiresome. Mycroft returned his head to the vertical and allowed himself to look bored: as a rule, this had the effect of making hostile interlocutors quail. The Foreign Secretary stared back.

To speak was nearly to capitulate, alas, but Mycroft wanted very much to see the back of the man. “Do bear in mind, Mr. Hareton, that if not for the attributes you cite, you would not even be aware that the threat existed.”

“Does it?” replied the Foreign Secretary, and got up at last. Zardari, Skeffings, and de la Pole followed him out. De la Pole, the last in the train, gave Mycroft an anxious glance as he went: so, doubtful again, and after all that work.

The JIO chairman had remained in his seat. “Is Walter going to reenter suddenly, hoping to catch us in the middle of something compromising?” he asked once the latch clicked shut. And, when Mycroft shook his head: “I keep expecting him to question the reality of climate change.”

Mycroft gave him a thin smile. “I promise you that in private conversation he already has.” A short silence. “In private conversation _with me,_ Ellis. I do have some respect for civil liberties.”

“I’m not altogether sure how to feel about that,” said the chairman drily. “. . . You really have nothing?”

“You want to know whether I was holding back? No. The present situation is much too serious for that. Walter Hareton is tedious in the extreme, but I need every scrap of information he and his minions can bring me.”

Macdermid sighed. “Well, I’ll do what I can to rebuild the lost networks. You know, though: the quicker an agent is introduced, the likelier it is he’ll be rumbled.”

“And suspicions will be high on the Russian end just now,” Mycroft said. “Try not to lose anyone too valuable, will you?”

“Ha,” said Macdermid, and put his head in his hands for a moment before he left.

*

Mycroft never paced, nor did he stoop to such expedients as picking his cuticles. He did not shout. He did not watch cat videos on YouTube or ITV detective shows set in especially scenic portions of the British Isles. When he needed a respite from thinking about one subject, he thought about another. Unfortunate that at present all paths led back to the question of what the Russians intended and the meagerness of the means available to prevent it.

Macdermid and Zardari were assets: competent, and capable of independent thought. Skeffings, the Defence Secretary, was useful when well managed. About Cyril de la Pole there was nothing to be done but to ignore him and wait for the Prime Minister to see fit to attend briefings himself. Hareton, now — Hareton was neither here nor there unless he took it into his head that he understood a situation, but that was exactly what he had done.

There had been a time, a few centuries past, when Mycroft could have rid himself of a fool like Hareton with a whisper in a king’s ear — though, sadly, he could have whispered into only one royal ear at a time, and the chances were good that the Hareton-equivalent would simultaneously be whispering in the other.

“Dammit,” Mycroft said to his empty office. A second brain was needed, one like his own, and no such brain was available or ever would be. But with that thought the embers of old anger were brightening again, so he turned his attention to the satellite data on troop movements in eastern Ukraine, and set the remembrance of Sherlock aside.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft's geopolitical predictions draw on an exaggerated version of our reality. I found Tim Marshall's book  
> [Prisoners of Geography](https://www.ft.com/content/a3203b9e-3b54-11e5-8613-07d16aad2152) useful for understanding Russian anxieties about NATO and the desire for a buffer zone against the West. 
> 
> That Russia has been interfering in [EU](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/10/everything-we-know-so-far-about-russian-election-meddling-in-europe/?utm_term=.627156a07355) and US politics isn't news to anybody. Russian attempts to [create social discord](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/us/politics/russia-sees-midterm-elections-as-chance-to-sow-fresh-discord-intelligence-chiefs-warn.html) seem to be real, as is the attempted coup in Montenegro. 
> 
> The ["stab in the back"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth) was a post-WWI right-wing German narrative, false of course, that the German military hadn’t lost the war but had been betrayed by German civilians, specifically republicans (the lower-case kind) and Jews. Needless to say, the Nazis ate up and exploited the “stab in the back.” It's interesting to note the myth's [fake-news component.](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3829)


	8. Outside Consultant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Attempting to attempt suicide at the Warren Street tube stop. Lycra Louts. Torn trousers. Isn't it supposed to be the _second_ time as farce?

— impact —

— voices, many, mostly variations on _loud_ , accents Estuary, Brixton, Oxbridge, more Estuary —

 _That cloud is_ just _like a weasel. Unless it’s like a whale —_

— “Fuck _off,_ ” Sherlock said, sitting up.

This wish not having been granted, he tried again: “ _Verpiss dich._ No? _Va te faire enculer._  . . . Still no? _Vaffanculo._ ” Wasn’t it supposed to be the _second_ time as farce?

The back of his head was wet, but only with water — gutter water, though, because it had rained heavily overnight, and with miniature flotsam in; he would almost rather have had the wetness be blood, because the sight of a head injury might have brought an end to the shouting. “Yes,” he said to the owner of the loud voice, “yes, I understand that your bicycle could have been damaged by its impact with my left side, but as you're abusing me in the conditional I gather it wasn't. Go away. No, _go away_.”

Someone else, speaking from the same elevation as Sherlock’s ear, put in:

“You know you’re bleeding all over Her Majesty’s roadbed?”

Sherlock withdrew his attention from the shouty Lycra Lout and looked down. How had he not noticed? The new arrival was quite right: the fabric on the distal side of his left thigh was torn and bloody, revealing a long laceration beneath, and a small pool of blood had formed under him. Well, that explained the pain in his leg.

The limp and the bleeding would make him conspicuous. Thus no pickpocketing, no Oyster card, and no speedy exit courtesy of Transport for London. There was nothing to do except to get up and go back to the flat, leaving a trail of blood apparently. The prospect didn’t appeal. Sherlock turned toward the person, the man, who had spoken.

 _There is nothing whatever remarkable about you,_ he thought. This made no difference.

The man had put his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders, and now he addressed himself to the bicyclist: “Look,” he said, “you’re not hurt, whereas the man on the ground bleeding obviously is. Your bike’s fine, his leg needs stitches. Off you go, then, yeah?”

The speaker’s height, when he stood up, would be well shy of Sherlock’s own six feet. Of his clothes, Sherlock could hear Mycroft’s voice saying that they might be best described as decent. But his “Yeah?” had been purely rhetorical and his intonation was that of someone used to being obeyed.

“Not bad,” Sherlock said, with complete sincerity.

The Lycra Lout seemed to try to speak and then to think better of speaking. _Finally._ Sherlock did not trouble to watch him pedal away, but instead took hold of the lanyard around the short authoritative man’s neck and turned the badge to read it.

Now _there_ was a question demanding an answer. “How can general practice at an NHS clinic possibly satisfy a former army doctor’s craving for danger?”

“Sorry, do you — Have we met?”

Sherlock let go the lanyard. “Yes, Dr. Watson, we have. Approximately two and a half minutes ago, by my reckoning.”

“But then how — You know what, never mind. That laceration really needs seeing to. If I take you to the A & E at UCH you’ll be ages, but my clinic’s round the corner and I’m on my lunch break anyhow. I can get you cleaned up and stitched in half an hour and you can be on your way.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said. He set aside for later consideration the surprise he felt, in favor of taking inventory of old injection sites. He had never used his legs much anyway and the skin had healed well. “Yes, all right.”

“Unless you’ve got a better offer.” Watson was smiling; a little mental review informed Sherlock that there had been a delay between his “Oh” and his “Yes, all right,” therefore he must supply a deflection so as to avoid arousing inconvenient interest: “Sorry, just a bit shaken,” he tried, which led to a series of worried questions about head impact and loss of consciousness before Watson nodded once and said, “Right, up you get,” and hauled Sherlock off the ground gently and, considering the disparity in their sizes, with remarkable ease.

Sherlock noted with interest that Watson had left an aluminium cane in the road as he turned his patient toward the clinic. The cane was an ugly thing, besides which its abandonment suggested a hypothesis. “I don’t want a record of this visit.”

“I can manage without your medical history. You allergic to lidocaine or latex?”

Sherlock became aware that the doctor was holding his elbow and that he was leaning into the offered support. “No,” he said. _Good manners make people willing to help you,_ he reminded himself. “Thank you, Doctor.”

Watson shrugged, but his hand remained steady on Sherlock’s arm. “You did say I crave danger, didn’t you? So, I’ll take the risk that nobody doing inventory notices one unaccounted-for suture kit and a local.” They walked on a few more paces; then: “As long as we’re being unofficial, I’m John.”

Sherlock’s well-learned disdain for the manipulations of “health professionals” asserted itself.  “Spare me the attempt to build rapport.”

“Is that what I’m doing? I guess it is. Name’s still John, though.”

Sherlock opened his mouth to say “Sherlock,” and then closed it again. They were walking almost arm-in-arm now, like a pair of Victorian gentlemen. Their strides didn’t quite match, and every few seconds one of them jostled against the other — this if nothing else should have been annoying, was annoying in fact — “Will,” Sherlock said eventually. “Will Vernet.”

A thought drifted into language and blew apart again, forgotten as soon as formed: _How long has it been_ —

John Watson gave him a sidelong look. “Will Vernet,” he repeated, scoffing. “That would be your MI6 cover name, would it?”

“Something like that.”

There might or might not have come a reply to this, but they had reached the clinic door.

*

Regular users of heroin may become more sensitive to pain. In the past couple of years, Sherlock had had more than one chance to experience the phenomenon, so he wasn’t surprised when Dr. John Watson’s lidocaine didn’t quite stop him feeling the antiseptic, the cleaning-out of the laceration, or the stitches going in. He distracted himself by studying Watson more closely. The doctor’s limp was, or perhaps had been if this morning’s preoccupations succeeded in curing it, psychosomatic. But from the vantage of the examination table it was easy to see that — Oh, yes. “You’re naturally left-handed,” Sherlock said.

Needle in, needle through, needle up and out, tie.

And a pause. “Yeah” — cautiously.

Needle in, needle through, needle up and out, tie.

“Your limp was psychosomatic in origin, but the shoulder wound must have been devastating.”

A breath drawn in. Needle in, needle through, needle out. Tie. Then another pause, longer than the first.

Needle in, needle through . . .

“Because,” Sherlock said, fascinated now, “the movements of your left hand as you tie off the suture are coarser than the movements of the right, as one would expect if you were right-handed. Yet the deliberation with which you use your right hand to insert the suturing needle and draw it through suggests that that hand is not naturally dominant. A doctor with your years of experience would not normally have to give such careful conscious attention to an everyday task when using his dominant hand. Finally, not only is your motor control deficient on the left side, but on close scrutiny it becomes obvious that the shoulder is stiff.

“To this seeming puzzle, I apply the hypothesis that you’ve seen combat and have suffered a serious wound to the left shoulder. It resulted in your retirement from the military and a long course of physiotherapy, which has enabled you to resume your profession, albeit not with perfect ease. So the hypothesis is a good one: it accounts for all the phenomena observed.”

— needle up and out; tie. John Watson stepped away, discarded the remains of the suture kit, and cleared his throat.

 “Well,” Sherlock said, not wanting to hear whatever came next. He slid down from the exam table and pulled his trousers off the back of the chair where he had hung them. Only as he was putting them on did he remember the rip the bicycle had made: it ran most of the way down the left thigh.

“Fucking hell,” John Watson was saying, “you could save the NHS a fair bit of money on diagnostic equipment and testing.”

Was that _admiration_?

The trousers were Jim’s, when you came right down to it, not even Sherlock’s own. Jim had chosen them, Jim had paid for them, Jim would replace them with another pair to suit the persona he had made Sherlock assume. Sherlock reached behind himself for the chair and sat in it.

“Hang on, superspy, I’ll hunt up some pins.” John Watson closed the exam room door behind him.

Sherlock was exhausted, and in a general and chronic way frightened, but specifically, in this clinic at this time, no one was looking for him to make a misstep and no one had any intention of killing or hurting him, or of killing or hurting anybody else. It was so easy to sit in the black vinyl chair and lean on the doctor’s desk, letting the sounds from the corridor drift past him; the fluorescent light from the overhead fixtures had an unpleasant effect on color if you had nothing to distract you from it, so he shut his eyes and just listened to the people walking back and forth, their exchanges, some of which were followed by a laugh or a short mock-disbelieving exclamation; “Oh, absolutely,” someone drawled. Gossip, gleeful but without malice. A metallic rattling approached and then receded but whatever was on the cart made no sound that Sherlock could hear. Plastic instruments or cleaning supplies in plastic bottles or toilet roll. . . . The morning’s fix wasn’t yet wearing off but the thought that after today there would be no more made him want to at least look at the remaining doses. He could open the kitchen drawer where he had left the packet, take it out, hold it . . .

“You awake?”

Sherlock bristled.

“Come on,” John Watson said, sounding amused, “stand up, so the rip hangs straight. I’m not much of a tailor but at least we can get you home without a breeze blowing through your tackle.” And then he blushed.

Sherlock mustered a dry “Thank you” at this.

John Watson sat in the chair Sherlock had vacated and urged Sherlock around to stand in front of him. He began pinning up the rip, working with the same effortful care with which he had stitched Sherlock’s thigh.

Sherlock watched, remotely, the top of John Watson’s head, the meticulous movements of his damaged and his undamaged hand. Regular heroin use, besides making pain relief more difficult, often wreaks havoc on sexual function in men. Or, to put it less tastefully, Sherlock did not get hard. He didn’t get hard-ish. He never woke up hard, he didn’t get hard when he took himself in hand, not that he had tried that in ages, and as he watched John Watson at work on his trouser leg, nothing stirred. But John Watson was flushing. Sherlock thought he could remember what that felt like: just a little arousal, a pleasant focused warmth, a sensation as of skin tightening, not enough to get in a person’s way, but enough to make him want to do something mildly reckless. (Crazy-reckless might follow.)

“My cane,” John Watson said, setting the last pin, “is lying in the gutter across the road from the Warren Street tube stop, isn’t it.” He sat back in the chair and looked straight up at Sherlock. His eyes were sparkling.

“I have no idea,” Sherlock said. “Someone may have appropriated it by now.” In the distant past he had taken a man’s head between his hands and rubbed his groin (his cock: soft or hard) against it. More than one man’s head, though each on a separate occasion. Now he felt as though he could half-hear a line of music that he once knew intimately. If he turned his head he could catch the direction from which it came to him. He could follow it —

“And you knew I’d left it behind, but you decided not to mention the fact. Why?”

John Watson’s tone was purely curious and in fact he was beginning to look delighted. Sherlock found himself answering more or less honestly. “An experiment.”

“You were testing a hypothesis.”

“I was.”

“Namely, that my limp was psychosomatic.”

“I note with interest,” Sherlock said, having recovered himself somewhat, “your use of the past tense.”

“You note it with smugness, you mean. Also, you’re lucky that cane was a cheap one. — Okay, then, tell me how you worked the rest of it out.”

Sherlock sniffed at him. “You must at least be of measurable intelligence; can’t you tell?” And, when John Watson looked at him blankly: “Think. You approached me where I lay in the road after the Lycra Lout struck me. And . . . ?”

Enlightenment at last. “I squatted down.”

“And then?”

“Well, we talked for a bit — you made all those deductions about me, and yes, I  did take note on the spot of how clever you are — and then we walked here — Oh. Right. I helped you get up.”

“No, Doctor, you didn’t ‘help me get up.’ You stood, you bent your knees and held me under the armpits, and then you more or less dead-lifted me.”

“I did think you seemed heavy. Practicing civil disobedience, were you?”

“Perhaps you remember that not three minutes ago I told you I was conducting an experiment.”

“It’s a crap experiment if there’s no control.”

Sherlock shrugged. “And yet it has led both of us to the same conclusion.”

“Oh, no, I think we’re still at the stage of hypothesis here.”

“Are we?” Sherlock said.

John Watson was beaming. Sherlock thought of setting his hand on John Watson’s nape, of how his fingers would rest against the curve of John Watson’s occiput. He looked away.

“Your name’s not actually Will Vernet,” John Watson said.”That’s a deduction _I_ made.”

“It’s not a very impressive deduction,” Sherlock replied.

“You’re not a superspy, either. You know how I know that?”

“Yes, I do, but please regale me with an account of the workings of your mind.”

“If you were a superspy, you’d have had a cover name ready when I asked you.”

“Perhaps I was stunned by the collision.”

“Perhaps not. Remember, I was there when you were deducing me. Also, if you want me to believe you’re brain-injured, you should dial down the intellectual obnoxiousness.”

“Not possible,” Sherlock heard himself say. He had just become aware of every minute of the time since he had fixed. What was he doing here? He needed to get back to the flat. Jim might have come back while he was out, might have removed the precious packet that Sherlock had left behind when he went out. _Precious. “My precioussssssss”_ — where was that from?

John Watson had fallen quiet, watching Sherlock. After a moment, he said: “So to sum up: you’re not a spy, Will isn’t your real name, you don’t want me to see your NHS record, and you are — trouble.”

“Yes.” An itch was setting up in the skin of Sherlock’s forearms. He found himself reluctant to scratch it when John Watson could see. Was there something else he should say? “And are you enjoying your life free of trouble?”

John Watson drew in his breath. “Sure.”

“Good,” Sherlock said. He shot his cuffs and glanced toward the door. _Signal: I am about to leave._

“Keep that wound clean,” John Watson said. “The sutures can come out in eight or ten days and I’m going to take a guess you’ll take care of them yourself.”

“I don’t think it’s true,” Sherlock said. “That you’re enjoying your life free of trouble.”  

Silence.

Sherlock was dying to fix. “I’m going to be away for a while. A few weeks, I can’t be sure,” he said.

John Watson nodded. “I guess I’ll see you around, then.”

Sherlock nodded back, and fled.

*

“Will,” John said aloud. He hadn’t missed as many data points as Sherlock believed he had.

 _Good luck in rehab,_ _but I don’t think you’ll be back._

He tore the used paper sheet off the exam table and rolled out a new one.

 _Will-o’-the-wisp_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock [isn't quite quoting](https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/h/i.htm#history-repeats) Marx, or was it Engels? But definitely not Hegel.
> 
> After coming up with the scenario for John and Sherlock's meeting in this chapter, I realized that I was borrowing heavily from their meeting in Glenmore's wonderful story "[Turn Left at the Park](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10912236/chapters/24263850)," which would have a huge sunlit room in my Mind Palace, if of course I _had_ a Mind Palace. Glenmore graciously gave me permission to crib from her. Thank you, my friend! 
> 
> [TSylvestris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris) is the most helpful and encouraging of beta readers. <3 <3 <3


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